Phylogenomic analysis reveals a mid-Cretaceous origin and revised taxonomy in mosquitoes, suggesting modern genera diversified alongside malaria parasites 100 million years later than believed.
Mosquitoes have a substantial impact on human and animal health, but their deeper evolutionary relationships have been difficult to resolve. We inferred a time-calibrated phylogenetic history of mosquitoes using conserved genome-wide markers from representatives of major lineages. Our analyses revealed that codon bias and positive selection in subfamily Anophelinae contributed to a substantial level of branch attraction bias between Anophelinae and outgroup taxa, which in our view has misled previous phylogenetic analyses of mosquitoes. Accounting for this systematic phylogenetic bias led to a revised view of mosquito evolution, including the nonmonophyly of subfamily Culicinae. Similarly, we dated the origin of mosquitoes to the mid-Cretaceous (~106 Mya) and most extant genera to after the KPg boundary <66 Mya, 100 My younger than previous estimates and coincident with the origin of Plasmodium parasites. Our study provides a foundation for future analyses of the evolution of mosquito-borne disease.
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Pierce et al. (2025) studied this question.
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