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Reply to: Amniote metabolism and the evolution of endothermy

Nature volume 621, pages E4–E6 (2023)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 06 September 2023

replying to R. Motani et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06411-y (2023).

In the accompanying Comment, Motani et al.1 raise four issues in response to our reconstruction of metabolic rates and resulting thermoregulatory strategies based on macromolecular oxidative damage accumulated in form of advanced lipoxidation end-products (ALEs)2. The use of ALEs as a molecular proxy for mitochondrial metabolic respiration enables direct integration of physiological information across living and extinct organisms2. The four issues raised by Motani et al. were addressed in our study and supplementary materials2, and do not materially affect our conclusions. We showed that a small number of key factors influence the use of accumulated ALEs that encode the metabolic signal, highlighting analyses in our study2 and areas for future proxy development.

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Fig. 1: Metabolic rates across amniotes.

Data availability

All spectroscopic data, metabolic rates, trees and our ancestral state reconstruction are published as part of our original study. Additional code with annotations, method details and guidelines, Bayesian ancestral state probability distribution plots (shown in Fig. 1b and extracted for additional major clades), data files and the correlation analysis are freely available in the Github repository14.

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Earth Science Section, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, USA

    Jasmina Wiemann & Matteo Fabbri

  2. Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Jasmina Wiemann

  3. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jasmina Wiemann, Jacques A. Gauthier, Pincelli M. Hull & Derek E. G. Briggs

  4. Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin, Germany

    Iris Menéndez

  5. Department of Chemistry, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jason M. Crawford

  6. Yale Peabody Museum, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jacques A. Gauthier, Pincelli M. Hull & Derek E. G. Briggs

  7. Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA

    Mark A. Norell

Authors
  1. Jasmina Wiemann
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Contributions

J.W. analysed and replotted the data and prepared Fig. 1. I.M. performed additional ASRs under different models, using diverse functions including the Bayesian ancestral state reconstruction yielding the probability distribution plots based on our published dataset. J.W. wrote the first draft of the response with major contributions from I.M., P.M.H. and D.E.G.B. All authors discussed the topic and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jasmina Wiemann or Iris Menéndez.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Wiemann, J., Menéndez, I., Crawford, J.M. et al. Reply to: Amniote metabolism and the evolution of endothermy. Nature 621, E4–E6 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06412-x

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