Harvard researchers examine how mammal spines evolve
From the long necks of giraffes that help them reach treetops to the flexibility of a cheetah’s spine that helps it go from zero to sixty in three seconds, mammals not only have the figurative backbone to do amazing things, but, more importantly, they have the literal one. But they weren’t always that way. A new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution by Harvard researchers and collaborators at the Field Museum of Natural History sheds light on how and when changes in the spine happened in mammal evolution. Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology Stephanie Pierce and postdoctoral researcher Katrina Jones discovered how a combination of developmental changes and adaptive pressures in the spines of synapsids, the extinct forerunners of mammals, laid the groundwork for the diversity of backbones seen in mammals today. Using a novel combination of techniques including biomechanical experimentation on the cadavers...