Nature Communications study looks at evolution of mammal backbones

Mammals have complex backbones compared to other animals, according to a press release by the Field Museum.

The November press release looks at a new study that was released in Nature Communications on how mammals' backbones work.

“Looking around, the animals and plants that surround us are remarkably complex, but putting a number to that phenomenon is very tricky," Katrina Jones, the paper’s first author and a paleontologist from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, said in the press release. "With this study, we wanted to take a complex system – the mammal vertebral column – and measure how its complexity changed through time. We show that increases in complexity were discrete steps like rungs on a ladder instead of a smooth increase like a ramp. Adaptations for high activity levels in mammals seem to trigger these jumps in complexity, and they continue to influence its evolution today."

The study looked at how and when mammals evolved their specialized backbones by examining mammals and their relatives from between 300 and 200 million years ago.