From ScienceDaily:
Bones are composites of protein fibers, collagen, and a biomaterial, hydroxyapatite. The more orderly the arrangement of the collagen fibers, the more stable the bone, but the more slowly it normally grows as well. The bones of mammals thus have a special structure. This allows them to grow quickly and yet remain stable. “We call this bone form fibrolamellar,” says the paleontologist.
Together with his PhD student Christen D. Shelton (now at the University of Cape Town), the scientist looked at humerus bones and femurs from a long-extinct land animal: the mammal predecessor Ophiacodon. This lived 300 million years ago. “Even in Ophiacodon, the bones grew as fibrolamellar bones,” says Sander to summarize the analysis results. “This indicates that the animal could already have been warm-blooded.”
Ophiacodon was up to two meters long, but otherwise resembled today’s lizards — and not without good reason: mammals and reptiles are related; they thus share a predecessor. In the family tree, Ophiacodon is very close to the place where these two branches separate.
However, lizards, turtles and other reptiles living today are cold-blooded. Until now, it has been assumed that this was the original form of the metabolism — i.e. that the shared ancestor of both animal groups was cold-blooded. Warm-bloodedness would thus be a further development, which arose over the course of mammalian evolution.
However, Ophiacodon appears a very short time after the division between mammals and reptiles. “This raises the question of whether its warm-bloodedness was actually a completely new development or whether even the very first land animals before the separation of both branches were warm-blooded,” says Sander. That is just speculation. However, if this theory is correct, we would have to drastically correct our image: the first reptiles would then also have been warm-blooded — and would have only discarded this type of metabolism later. Paper.(paywall) – Christen D. Shelton, Paul Martin Sander. Long bone histology of Ophiacodon reveals the geologically earliest occurrence of fibrolamellar bone in the mammalian stem lineage. Comptes Rendus Palevol, 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.crpv.2017.02.002 More.
Let’s keep in mind that this is an inference that leads to a speculation. However, if warmbloodedness is a more ancient trait than we have thought, the information traffic jam 300 million years ago requires more explanation than we are likely to hear just now.
See also: Life in preCambrian much more dynamic than thought? 635 to 540 million years ago? So much for the long, slow period of development of these characteristics.
Devolution: Getting back to the simple life
and
Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen
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