I am working as part of an international collaborative group to assemble the basic backbone of the protostome tree of life, which includes all triploblastic animals except those directly related to vertebrates. Protostomes constitute more than one million of the 1.7 million named species of living organisms, including familiar animals such as mollusks, insects, flatworms, roundworms, and many others of medical and economic importance. However, relationships among these groups are still contentious, so the backbone of the animal tree of life cannot currently be proposed without a large degree of uncertainty.
