The RMBR crustacean team comprising of Professor Peter Ng, Dr. Joelle Lai and JC Mendoza are currently in wintery Washington D.C for a Xanthid workshop hosted by the Smithsonian Museum. This is the culmination of the second crustacean phylogeny project titled “Xanthid phylogeny: a revision using a multi-character and multi-gene approach” funded by the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT). This is a global multi-disciplinary study of one of the largest groups of crabs – the Xanthoidea – in the world, and involves a large data set including the American and Atlantic fauna. The first phase of this study, also funded by EDIT, focussed on the xanthoid crabs of the Indo-west Pacific and took place at the Raffles Museum in March 2010. (http://rafflesmuseum.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/the-crab-team/)
In addition to the original members of EDIT 1 (Peter Ng, Joelle Lai, JC Mendoza, Professor Danièle Guinot (Emeritus Professor, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, France) and Dr. Paul Clark (Researcher in the Crustacea Research Group, The Natural History Museum (NHM), London), EDIT 2 includes our American colleagues from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Dr. Rafael Lemaitre and Dr. Darryl Felder and his PhD student, Brent Thoma from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. While the first EDIT project focused on the xanthoid crabs of the Indo-west Pacific, the second one incorporates a much larger data set with the inclusion of American and Atlantic fauna.
Team Crustacea (EDIT 2) at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center, MD, USA. From left: Prof. Peter Ng, Brent Thoma, Dr. Paul Clark, Prof. Daniele Guinot, Dr. Rafael Lemaitre, Prof. Daryl Felder, JC Mendoza & Dr. Joelle Lai.
(Click on image for larger view)
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