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      A basal ichthyosauriform with a short snout from the Lower Triassic of China.

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          Abstract

          The incompleteness of the fossil record obscures the origin of many of the more derived clades of vertebrates. One such group is the Ichthyopterygia, a clade of obligatory marine reptiles that appeared in the Early Triassic epoch, without any known intermediates. Here we describe a basal ichthyosauriform from the upper Lower Triassic (about 248 million years ago) of China, whose primitive skeleton indicates possible amphibious habits. It is smaller than ichthyopterygians and had unusually large flippers that probably allowed limited terrestrial locomotion. It also retained characteristics of terrestrial diapsid reptiles, including a short snout and body trunk. Unlike more-derived ichthyosauriforms, it was probably a suction feeder. The new species supports the sister-group relationships between ichthyosauriforms and Hupehsuchia, the two forming the Ichthyosauromorpha. Basal ichthyosauromorphs are known exclusively from south China, suggesting that the clade originated in the region, which formed a warm and humid tropical archipelago in the Early Triassic. The oldest unequivocal record of a sauropterygian is also from the same stratigraphic unit of the region.

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          Lethally hot temperatures during the Early Triassic greenhouse.

          Yadong Sun, Michael Joachimski, Paul B. Wignall … (2012)
          Global warming is widely regarded to have played a contributing role in numerous past biotic crises. Here, we show that the end-Permian mass extinction coincided with a rapid temperature rise to exceptionally high values in the Early Triassic that were inimical to life in equatorial latitudes and suppressed ecosystem recovery. This was manifested in the loss of calcareous algae, the near-absence of fish in equatorial Tethys, and the dominance of small taxa of invertebrates during the thermal maxima. High temperatures drove most Early Triassic plants and animals out of equatorial terrestrial ecosystems and probably were a major cause of the end-Smithian crisis.
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            Homeotic effects, somitogenesis and the evolution of vertebral numbers in recent and fossil amniotes.

            Johannes Müller, Torsten Scheyer, Jason J Head … (2010)
            The development of distinct regions in the amniote vertebral column results from somite formation and Hox gene expression, with the adult morphology displaying remarkable variation among lineages. Mammalian regionalization is reportedly very conservative or even constrained, but there has been no study investigating vertebral count variation across Amniota as a whole, undermining attempts to understand the phylogenetic, ecological, and developmental factors affecting vertebral column variation. Here, we show that the mammalian (synapsid) and reptilian lineages show early in their evolutionary histories clear divergences in axial developmental plasticity, in terms of both regionalization and meristic change, with basal synapsids sharing the conserved axial configuration of crown mammals, and basal reptiles demonstrating the plasticity of extant taxa. We conducted a comprehensive survey of presacral vertebral counts across 436 recent and extinct amniote taxa. Vertebral counts were mapped onto a generalized amniote phylogeny as well as individual ingroup trees, and ancestral states were reconstructed by using squared-change parsimony. We also calculated the relationship between presacral and cervical numbers to infer the relative influence of homeotic effects and meristic changes and found no correlation between somitogenesis and Hox-mediated regionalization. Although conservatism in presacral numbers characterized early synapsid lineages, in some cases reptiles and synapsids exhibit the same developmental innovations in response to similar selective pressures. Conversely, increases in body mass are not coupled with meristic or homeotic changes, but mostly occur in concert with postembryonic somatic growth. Our study highlights the importance of fossils in large-scale investigations of evolutionary developmental processes.
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              "Pachyostosis" in aquatic amniotes: a review.

              Alexandra Houssaye (2009)
              During the course of amniote evolution, numerous taxa secondarily adapted to an aquatic life. It appears that many of these taxa primitively display "pachyostosis," an osseous specialization characterized by an increase in bone compactness and/or volume. The term "pachyostosis" is used in morphological and histological descriptions to describe what in fact corresponds to different patterns. The aim of this paper is to present the current state of knowledge relative to this adaptation among aquatic amniotes. All the taxa that have returned to an aquatic environment are listed. Moreover, their degree of adaptation to the marine environment, their life environment, and the nature of their "pachyostotic" pattern, when present, are described. This inventory enables the evaluation of the current quality of the data relative to this specialization and provides an indication of the work that remains to be done. The functional consequences of "pachyostosis," and notably its importance for buoyancy control in the context of hydrostatic regulation of the body trim, are discussed and opposed to the requirement of improved swimming abilities in the case of a hydrodynamic mode of trim regulation. Questions are posed about the signification of the polymorphism displayed by this specialization between different taxa, different specimens of the same taxon and different bones of the same specimen, and the problem of quantification of pachyostosis is discussed. © 2009 ISZS, Blackwell Publishing and IOZ/CAS.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Nature
                Title: Nature
                ISSN (Electronic): 1476-4687
                ISSN (Print): 0028-0836
                Publication date (Electronic): Jan 22 2015
                Volume: 517
                Issue: 7535
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, USA.
                [2 ] 1] Laboratory of Orogenic Belt and Crustal Evolution, Ministry of Education, and Department of Geology and Geological Museum, Peking University, Yiheyuan Street 5, Beijing 100871, China [2] State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy (Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Science), Nanjing 210008, China.
                [3 ] Department of Research, Anhui Geological Museum, Jiahe Road 999, Hefei, Anhui 230031, China.
                [4 ] Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Mangiagalli, 34-20133 Milan, Italy.
                [5 ] Center of Integrative Research, The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois 60605-2496, USA.
                [6 ] Key Laboratory of Economic Stratigraphy and Palaeogeography, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 39 East Beijing Road, Nanjing 210008, China.
                Article
                Publisher Item ID: nature13866
                DOI: 10.1038/nature13866
                PubMed ID: 25383536
                SO-VID: b7c30aca-4284-43ec-810e-002686562ec0
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