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Developmental biology

Serpent clocks tick faster

Nature volume 454, pages 282–283 (2008)Cite this article

Snakes have graceful, elongated bodies containing hundreds of vertebrae. This extreme of morphology stems from evolutionary changes in a developmental clock that regulates body patterning.

At first glance, a snake looks like a long tail with a head at one end; but snakes are not 'all tail'. Their tail — defined as the part of the body that follows the cloaca (the opening at the end of the genital and intestinal tracts) — is in fact relatively short. In front of the tail, the snake has a neck, thorax and abdomen like any other reptile, although the boundaries between these regions are not obvious. Loss of these boundaries in the snake body, along with its loss of limbs, is thought to be due to evolutionary changes in the workings of the Hox developmental genes4. How snakes make such large numbers of vertebrae is a separate question.

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Figure 1: Serpentine silhouettes.
Figure 2: Speeding-up somitogenesis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Freek J. Vonk and Michael K. Richardson are at the Institute of Biology, Leiden University, PO Box 9516, 2300 RA Leiden, the Netherlands. f.j.vonk@biology.leidenuniv.nl m.k.richardson@biology.leidenuniv.nl ,

    Freek J. Vonk & Michael K. Richardson

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  1. Freek J. Vonk
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  2. Michael K. Richardson
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Vonk, F., Richardson, M. Serpent clocks tick faster. Nature 454, 282–283 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/454282a

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