Study challenges accepted notion of mammal spine evolution

March 16, 2021
Vertebrae from a Dinodontosaurus, an extinct forerunner to mammals, in the collection at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Vertebrae from a Dinodontosaurus, an extinct forerunner to mammals, in the collection at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. © Katrina Jones/Museum of Comparative Zoology
Read about research led by former postdoc Katrina Jones, working in the Stephanie Pierce lab and MCZ Vertebrate Paleontology, in the Harvard Gazette. Jones and colleagues looked at the vertebrae of modern reptiles, mammals, and the extinct nonmammalian synapsids to determine how their vertebrae changed over time and how that affected the way these creatures likely moved. The study is published in Current Biology