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Cracking open a fossil bone reveals rapid juvenile growth in early tetrapods

November 28, 2022

The rise of tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) is one of the iconic evolutionary transitions preserved in the fossil record. These animals, which lived about 385 to 320 million years ago during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods of Earth’s history, set the stage for the evolution and diversification of all other terrestrial vertebrates as we know them today, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals like humans.

It was long thought that these early animals grew very slowly throughout their lifetime, gradually getting bigger and bigger, similar to a modern...

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Artistic reconstruction of the Ordovician fossils Mieridduryn bonniae

Welsh “weird wonder” fossils add piece to puzzle of arthropod evolution

November 15, 2022

The most famous fossils from the Cambrian explosion of animal life over half a billion years ago are very unlike their modern counterparts. These “weird wonders,” such as the five-eyed Opabinia with its distinctive frontal proboscis, and the fearsome apex predator Anomalocaris with its radial mouthparts and spiny feeding appendages, have become icons in popular culture. However, they were only quite recently recognised as extinct stages of evolution that are crucial for understanding the origins of one of the largest and most important animal phyla,...

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Global warming spawned the age of reptiles

Global warming spawned the age of reptiles

August 19, 2022

Studying climate change-induced mass extinctions in the deep geological past allows researchers to explore the impact of environmental crises on organismal evolution. One principal example is the Permian-Triassic climatic crises, a series of climatic shifts driven by global warming that occurred between the Middle Permian (265 million years ago) and Middle Triassic (230 million years ago). These climatic shifts caused two of the largest mass extinctions in the history of life at the end of the Permian, the first at 261myo and the other at 252myo, eliminating 86% of all animal species...

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Lungless salamanders develop lungs as embryos despite lung loss in adults for millions of years

Lungless salamanders develop lungs as embryos despite lung loss in adults for millions of years

August 17, 2022

Lungs are essential to many vertebrates including humans. However, four living amphibian clades have independently eliminated pulmonary respiration and lack lungs, breathing primarily through their wet skin. Little is known of the developmental basis of lung loss in these clades.

In a new study in Science Advances researchers in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard...

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Biohybrid fish on a hook

Biohybrid fish made from human cardiac cells swims like the heart beats

February 14, 2022
Harvard University researchers, including MCZ Faculty-Curator of Ichthyology George Lauder and graduate student David Matthews, in collaboration with colleagues from Emory University, have developed the first fully autonomous biohybrid fish from human stem-cell derived cardiac muscle cells. An autonomously swimming biohybrid fish designed with human cardiac biophysics is published in Science and featured by the... Read more about Biohybrid fish made from human cardiac cells swims like the heart beats