Live birth in an archosauromorph reptile

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. Although live birth evolved repeatedly in other clades, it has not been found in archosauromorphs, the group including modern birds and crocodilians. Here, the authors describe a fossilized pregnantDinocephalosaurusfrom ∼245 million years ago, providing evidence of live birth in archosauromorphs.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2017-02-14

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/ncomms14445PMID 28195584PMCID 5316873
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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