Genotypic sex determination enabled adaptive radiations of extinct marine reptiles

Chris L. Organ (), Daniel E. Janes, Andrew Meade and Mark Pagel ()
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Chris L. Organ: Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
Daniel E. Janes: Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
Andrew Meade: School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading
Mark Pagel: School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading

Nature, 2009, vol. 461, issue 7262, 389-392

Abstract: Extinct reptiles, sea and sex Land vertebrates have returned to the sea many times over the ages. Modern seals and whales, as mammals, are live-bearing, and their sex is determined by genotype. But what of the many reptiles that once thronged the seas, such as the mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs? Sex determination might be environmentally or genotypically determined, and birth might be live, or through eggs. Based on phylogenetic analysis, Organ et al. propose that the sea-going reptiles of the past were not only live-bearers (which we know from the fossil record) but had genotypic sex determination. This would have freed them from the need to return to land to give birth (amniote eggs perish under water) and enabled their morphological transformation into highly evolved fish-like forms.

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1038/nature08350

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