Old tuatara slides show genital swelling in last common ancestor of vertebrates
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - 08:20
in Biology & Nature
(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers with the University of Florida has found evidence of genital swelling in a tuatara embryo from over a hundred years ago and it offers evidence that penile evolutionary development in vertebrates only occurred once. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Thomas Sanger, Marissa Gredler and Martin Cohn describe how they created 3D images of the endangered reptile from old slides found in a museum and what they learned as a result.