Brian M. Wiegmann

TL;DR: The phylogeny of all major insect lineages reveals how and when insects diversified and provides a comprehensive reliable scaffold for future comparative analyses of evolutionary innovations among insects.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that flies experienced three episodes of rapid radiation—lower Diptera (220 Ma), lower Brachycera (180 Ma), and Schizophora (65 Ma)—and a number of life history transitions to hematophagy, phytophagy and parasitism in the history of fly evolution over 260 million y.

TL;DR: The adaptive-zone hypothesis predicts that if multiple lineages have invaded a new adaptive zone, they should be consistently more diverse than their (equally old) sister groups, when the latter retain the more primitive way of life.

TL;DR: Evidence from nucleotide sequences of six single-copy nuclear protein coding genes used to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships and estimate evolutionary divergence times is presented, finding strong support for a close relationship between Coleoptera (beetles) and Strepsiptera, a previously proposed, but analytically controversial relationship.

TL;DR: Significant areas critical to future advances in understanding dipteran phylogeny include the relationships among the basal infraorders of Diptera and Brachycera and the relationships between the superfamilies of acalyptrates.