Co-option of neck muscles supported the vertebrate water-to-land transition

Eglantine Heude (), Hugo Dutel, Frida Sanchez-Garrido, Karin D. Prummel, Robert Lalonde, France Lam, Christian Mosimann, Anthony Herrel and Shahragim Tajbakhsh
Additional contact information
Eglantine Heude: CNRS UMR5242 Université Claude Bernard Lyon-1
Hugo Dutel: University of Bristol
Frida Sanchez-Garrido: CNRS UMR 7221
Karin D. Prummel: University of Zurich
Robert Lalonde: Anschutz Medical Campus
France Lam: Sorbonne Universités
Christian Mosimann: University of Zurich
Anthony Herrel: CNRS UMR 7179
Shahragim Tajbakhsh: Université Paris Cité

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract A major event in vertebrate evolution was the separation of the skull from the pectoral girdle and the acquisition of a functional neck, transitions that required profound developmental rearrangements of the musculoskeletal system. The neck is a hallmark of the tetrapod body plan and allows for complex head movements on land. While head and trunk muscles arise from distinct embryonic mesoderm populations, the origins of neck muscles remain elusive. Here, we combine comparative embryology and anatomy to reconstruct the mesodermal contribution to neck evolution. We demonstrate that head/trunk-connecting muscle groups have conserved mesodermal origins in fishes and tetrapods and that the neck evolved from muscle groups present in fishes. We propose that expansions of mesodermal populations into head and trunk domains during embryonic development underpinned the emergence and adaptation of the tetrapod neck. Our results provide evidence for the exaptation of archetypal muscle groups in ancestral fishes, which were co-opted to acquire novel functions adapted to a terrestrial lifestyle.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54724-x Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-54724-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54724-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().