Ancient crocodiles were more diverse than modern crocodiles due to rapid evolution. Modern crocodiles live in rivers, lakes and wetlands, but ancient crocodiles flourished on land and in the oceans. Some even adopted dolphin-like adaptations to living in oceans, while others lived on land as plant eaters.
Stephanie Pierce, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, co-authored the study in ...
In 2018 researchers from New York University found that little skates, which scuttle along the sea floor on two leg-like fins, use the same motor neurons and genes that help humans and other land vertebrates walk. The study’s findings suggested the neural networks required for walking may have been present in the common ancestor of skates and mammals about 420 million years ago. But how these ancient ancestors walked remained a mystery.
Earth is home to millions of known species of plants and animals, but by no means are they distributed evenly. For instance, rainforests cover less than 2 percent of Earth's total surface, yet they are home to 50 percent of Earth's species. Oceans account for 71 percent of Earth's total surface but contain only 15 percent of Earth's species. What drives this uneven distribution of species on Earth is a major question for scientists.
In a paper published February 16 in the Journal of...
Fin-to-limb transition is an icon of key evolutionary transformations. Many studies focus on understanding the evolution of the simple fin into a complicated limb skeleton by examining the fossil record. In a paper published February 4 in Cell, researchers at Harvard and Boston Children's Hospital examined what's occurring at the genetic level to drive different patterns in the fin skeleton versus the limb skeleton.
Researchers, led by M. Brent Hawkins, a recent doctoral...
The colors in a flower patch appear completely different to a bear, a honeybee, a butterfly and humans. The ability to see these colors is generated by specific properties of opsins - light-sensitive proteins in the retina of our eyes. The number of opsins expressed and the molecular structure of the receptor proteins determines the colors we see.
When tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) began to move from water to land roughly 390 million years ago it set in motion the rise of lizards, birds, mammals, and all land animals that exist today, including humans and some aquatic vertebrates such as whales and dolphins.
The earliest tetrapods originated from their fish ancestors in the Devonian period and are more than twice as old as the oldest dinosaur fossils. They resembled a cross between a giant salamander and a crocodile and were about 1-2 meters long, had gills, webbed feet and tail fins, and were still heavily tied...
In a new study in Current Biology, a team of researchers led by Liming Cai ('20) and Prof. Charles Davis presented the most complete genome yet assembled of one of the major Rafflesiaceae lineages, Sapria himalayana.
The genetic analysis revealed an astonishing degree of gene loss and surprising amounts of gene theft from its ancient and modern...
PhD candidate Alex Heyde (Mahadevan Lab) and Professor L. Mahadevan have developed a mathematical model to help explain how termites construct their intricate mounds.
The research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesbuilt on previous studies in the Mahadevan lab on termite mound physiology and morphogenesis. Previous research showed that day-to-night temperature variations drive convective flow in the...
Andrew Biewener, Charles P. Lyman Professor of Biology and Director of the Concord Field Station, collaborated with colleagues at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, to examine varying muscle functions in humans during different motor activities. The study published in the Journal...
