True Flies – Diptera

Abstract

With over 150,000 described species in ~180 families, the insect Order Diptera (true fl ies) is one of the largest and most diverse groups of organisms. Flies exhibit an extremely wide range of morphological characters that have supported or confounded phylogenetic inferences within the group. Though molecular phylogenies exist, few have addressed macroevolutionary questions within the order and none has comprehensively addressed the order as a whole. Fossil and molecular data indicate that the earliest divergences among living dipterans occurred in the late Paleozoic, 270– 251 million years ago (Ma). Most divergences among fam- ilies occurred in the Triassic and Jurassic, 251–146 Ma. Th