A team of researchers led by Harvard University, using advanced techniques, found that
The authors of the work found:Although the degree of sagittal bending did increase during mammalian evolution, the dorsal bones of the earliest synapsids were optimized for rigid attachment, and the evolutionary transition to mammals did not include the lateral bending stage of reptiles.
Instead, they found that modernlizards and other reptiles have unique spinal morphology and functions that do not represent ancestral locomotion. And also that those same ancestors of mammals did not move like lizards, as scientists previously believed.
There is a long-standing idea that in evolutionmammals there was a transition directly from lateral to sagittal bending, but it is too simple. Lizards and mammals split from each other millions of years ago, each going on their own evolutionary journey.
Stephanie Pierce, Thomas D. Cabot Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
First, the authors measured the shape of the vertebrae of somereptiles, mammals, salamanders and some fossil non-mammalian synapsids. Specimens came from museum collections around the world, including modern skeletons.
The researchers then examined how they couldfunction of the vertebrae: They used data from their previous work, which compared the shape of the vertebrae with the degree of movement of the vertebrae in living lizards and mammals.
The findings allowed researchersto map the variation in vertebral function across a large sample of animals, including fossils, they reconstructed the exact combination of functional traits that describe each group of animals.
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