I am ready to bet that you have some object or have seen one around made of mother-of-pearl, like a piece of jewelry, buttons, or house decoration. If you are nodding yes right now, you have had a piece of a shell from a vetigastropod in your hands - google ‘abalone shell’ for an example!

We present a well resolved backbone phylogeny for this major lineage of marine gastropods, who dominated Paleozoic oceans. These ancient internal branches are hard to resolve! We find conflicting results in two deep splits of the tree, but as we demonstrate, this is not caused by ancient introgression nor by any of a variety of possible methodological errors.

Check out the paper in Systematic Biology to learn more! With James Reimer (University of the Ryukyus) and Gonzalo Giribet (Harvard University).