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Evolutionary physiology

A bone for all seasons

Nature volume 487, pages 310–311 (2012)Cite this article

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Because mammals have such high metabolic rates, it has long been thought that their growth is invulnerable to seasonal variation. But their bones turn out to contain annual lines, just as those of cold-blooded animals do. See Letter p.358

The bones of at least some animals contain a record of yearly growth, akin to the rings of tree trunks. But what causes this, and does it occur in all animals? These questions arise from our knowledge that corals and molluscs lay down regular growth lines in their skeletons, and that annual growth lines have also been recorded in fishes, amphibians and some reptiles. Because these are slow-growing, cold-blooded animals, the lines were widely assumed1 to represent pauses in growth resulting from the animals' inability to withstand cyclical environmental stresses such as cold or lack of nutrients. The discovery of these growth lines in dinosaurs2 fostered the hypothesis that they, too, were slow-growing and had 'typical reptilian' metabolic patterns. But reports2 of growth lines in some large fossilized birds, as well as in some fossilized and living mammals, considerably weakened this hypothesis.

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Figure 1: Marking time.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion3 were published online on 27 June 2012.

References

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  1. Kevin Padian is in the Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.,

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Correspondence to Kevin Padian.

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Padian, K. A bone for all seasons. Nature 487, 310–311 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11382

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