Finding molecular data from Re: paleonet student's request

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>  Dear all,
>  
>  A student of mine will undertake a work to complete a BSc thesis
>  provisionally titled: "The phylogeny of sharks, based on morphological
>  data from Recent and fossil forms and on molecular data". Could anyone on
>  the list suggest what good starting points are for a student to search
>  literature on such a topic. The student is a biologist specialising in
>  vertebrate zoology. His knowledge on geology is probably limited, but not
>  much will be needed for this project. The thesis work will be mainly
>  literature-based, the student (most probably) won't include new specimens
>  or analysis in his thesis. Thanks in advance.
>  

For the molecular data, a search on GenBank or EMBL will be very useful.  GenBank has a Taxonomy section that you can use to search for particular groups of organisms (either by browsing or through a direct search): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/taxonomyhome.html/

If you keep clicking on names down to the species, you will get to a page with a box to the right that says Entrez records.  Under direct links, click on the number in the nucleotide row.  This gives you a list of the gene sequences reported for the species.  Click on a listed sequence, and you will get detailed information, including information about the article the data came from.  Note, however, that GenBank is not too good at monitoring the taxonomic literature (as opposed to the more biomedical literature), at least for the invertebrates that I often look up, so purportedly unpublished or in press data may be published-try a search on the author's names in a Biological Abstracts-type database.  



    Dr. David Campbell 
    Old Seashells 
    University of Alabama 
    Biodiversity & Systematics 
    Dept. Biological Sciences 
    Box 870345 
    Tuscaloosa, AL  35487-0345 USA
    bivalve@mail.davidson.alumlink.com

That is Uncle Joe, taken in the masonic regalia of a Grand Exalted Periwinkle of the Mystic Order of Whelks-P.G. Wodehouse, Romance at Droitgate Spa