Anomalously high variation in postnatal development is ancestral for dinosaurs but lost in birds.

ABSTRACT: Compared with all other living reptiles, birds grow extremely fast and possess unusually low levels of intraspecific variation during postnatal development. It is now clear that birds inherited their high rates of growth from their dinosaurian ancestors, but the origin of the avian condition of low variation during development is poorly constrained. The most well-understood growth trajectories of later Mesozoic theropods (e.g., Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus) show similarly low variation to birds, contrasting with higher variation in extant crocodylians. Here, we show that deep within Dinosauria, among the earliest-diverging dinosaurs, anomalously high intraspecific variation is widespread but then is lost in more derived theropods. This style of development is ancestral for dinosaurs and their

SUBMITTER: Griffin CT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5187714 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature