By Susan Milius
Stick insects may have done what biologists once thought was impossible: lose something as complicated as a wing in the course of evolution but recover it millions of years later.
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That’s not supposed to happen with so-called complex traits, at least according to a long-reigning view of evolution, says Michael F. Whiting of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Yet that’s the story revealed by a new family tree based on DNA data from 37 species of stick insects, he and his colleagues report in the Jan. 16 Nature.