Table 1.

Statistical comparison of morphology against other biologic features

Feature	Mantel r	P value	No. of phyla
No. of cell types	0.3387	0.01	29
Minimum body size	0.09537	0.248	28
Maximum body size	0.4875	0.004	28
Range in body size	0.4862	0.007	28
Species level diversity	0.3678	0.007	32
Genome length	0.278	0.028	22
Protein (superfamily)	0.2512	0.141	12
Protein (family)	0.1701	0.218	12
Protein (architecture)	−0.288	0.886	12
microRNA	0.39	0.005	24

The positions of phyla were calculated in two manners. First, the modeled character suites for the ancestral nodes of the individual phyla were projected onto the morphospace constructed with Ax’s 212 operational taxa. This method includes the disparity contained within phyla to some degree and therefore could be potentially biased by differential sampling. Second, the modeled character suites for the ancestral nodes were independently ordinated by using NMDS. This method treats each phylum equally and disregards the synapomorphies contained within each phylum such that the structure of the data are not controlled by differential sampling. The results were the same, so only the later is presented. Correlations between matrices were analyzed by using Mantel tests (Spearman), which compare the rank-order distance between phyla within the two matrices. The number of phyla included in the test varies with the availability of data (lists of phyla included in the different comparisons are presented in SI Appendix, Table S3). Multivariate datasets (miRNA and proteins) were analyzed in a similar manner to the morphological dataset (NMDS). Body size data are from McClain and Boyer (38). Genome length data were accessed from the animal genome size database