Live birth in an archosauromorph reptile

Jun Liu (), Chris L. Organ, Michael J. Benton, Matthew C. Brandley and Jonathan C. Aitchison
Additional contact information
Jun Liu: School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, Hefei University of Technology
Chris L. Organ: Montana State University
Michael J. Benton: School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
Matthew C. Brandley: School of Life and Environmental Sciences, The University of Sydney
Jonathan C. Aitchison: School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Live birth has evolved many times independently in vertebrates, such as mammals and diverse groups of lizards and snakes. However, live birth is unknown in the major clade Archosauromorpha, a group that first evolved some 260 million years ago and is represented today by birds and crocodilians. Here we report the discovery of a pregnant long-necked marine reptile (Dinocephalosaurus) from the Middle Triassic (∼245 million years ago) of southwest China showing live birth in archosauromorphs. Our discovery pushes back evidence of reproductive biology in the clade by roughly 50 million years, and shows that there is no fundamental reason that archosauromorphs could not achieve live birth. Our phylogenetic models indicate that Dinocephalosaurus determined the sex of their offspring by sex chromosomes rather than by environmental temperature like crocodilians. Our results provide crucial evidence for genotypic sex determination facilitating land-water transitions in amniotes.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14445 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:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms14445

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

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14445

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 ().