Snake evolution happens to have another way
January 5,2015
Previously, people thought that snakes have developed from snakes into a more simplified form. But, paleontologists Jason Head and David Polly found out that snakes didn't necessarily evolved from lizards. They have found new ways of how they developed through finding out that that there were distinctions in the snakes vertebral bones and the backbone of the four legged lizards. In the concept of hox genes which govern the boundaries of the neck, trunk, lumbar, sacral and tail regions of limbed animals, they were thought of disrupting the snakes body forms causing them to have no limbs and a simplified structure. But actually, if the hox genes which only control a small part of the gene or else the structures of the snake and lizard would be identical which is not true. Polly said, "It isn't that snakes have lost regions and Hox expression; it is that mammals and birds have independently gained distinct regions by augmenting the ordinary Hox expression shared by early amniotes." This means that it doesn't mean snakes are simplified, its that animals have gained more distinctness in their body which makes it more complex possibly for better adaptation to their environment like better maneuverability and prey catching. Additionally through combining snake vertebrae information with fossils, snake evolution was very unsimilar to what was concluded from developmental genetics alone. Through this study, the direction of how we thought of evoution is opposite of what we have thought as before.
This relates to our current unit in the sense of right now that we are learning about evolution and how many species evolved overtime. Scientists are now beginning to take in new perspectives of how reptiles have evolve based on this scientific study. Originally, it would be thought by us that snakes have evolved from lizards which makes some sense because they are part of the same reptile family. But what is unique is that snakes were discovered to be different from their lizard ancestors unlike birds and mammals which most of them have the same vestigial structures of their ancestors. It very likely could be for the snakes to take in better ability to catch prey or protect themselves from natural disasters or something similar to that. In short, this begins to gain scientists a new perspective on how reptiles and possibly many species evolved over time and why they might change some structures from their ancestors.
With this article in mind, although snakes may not have evolved directly from lizards, do they still have a common ancestor in their evolutionary tree?
ReplyDeleteI couldn't find a adequate resource but yes, I assume they still do have a common ancestor in the evolutionary tree. Snakes must have once in the ancient times had had the same traits as the ancestors. But, they may have gone through natural selection because the way they originally functioned must have not fit to their current environment. So, the ones who had the new trait in terms of the snake has today, lived off and reproduced and the ones who didn't died.
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