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Evidence of torpor in the tusks of Lystrosaurus from the Early Triassic of Antarctica.

ABSTRACT: Antarctica has hosted a wide range of ecosystems over the past 500-million years. Early in the Mesozoic, the Antarctic portion of southern Pangaea had a more habitable climate, but its position within the polar circle imposed extreme photoperiod seasonality on its resident flora and fauna. It remains unclear to what degree physiological adaptations underpinned the ability of tetrapods to establish the terrestrial communities captured in the fossil record. Here we use regular and stressful growth marks preserved in the dentine of ever-growing tusks of the Early Triassic mammalian predecessor, Lystrosaurus, to test for adaptations specific to this polar inhabitant. We find evidence of prolonged stress indicative of torpor when compared to tusk samples from non-polar populations of Lystrosaurus. These preliminary findings are to our knowledge the oldest instance of torpor yet reported in the fossil record and demonstrate unexpected physiological flexibility in Lystrosaurus that may have contributed its survivorship through the Permo-Triassic mass extinction.

SUBMITTER: Whitney MR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7453012 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evidence of torpor in the tusks of Lystrosaurus from the Early Triassic of Antarctica.

Whitney Megan R MR Sidor Christian A CA

Communications biology 20200827 1

Antarctica has hosted a wide range of ecosystems over the past 500-million years. Early in the Mesozoic, the Antarctic portion of southern Pangaea had a more habitable climate, but its position within the polar circle imposed extreme photoperiod seasonality on its resident flora and fauna. It remains unclear to what degree physiological adaptations underpinned the ability of tetrapods to establish the terrestrial communities captured in the fossil record. Here we use regular and stressful growth ...[more]

PMID: 32855434

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Project description:Examining the geological past of our planet allows us to study periods of severe climatic and biological crises and recoveries, biotic and abiotic ecosystem fluctuations, and faunal and floral turnovers through time. Furthermore, the recovery dynamics of large predators provide a key for evaluation of the pattern and tempo of ecosystem recovery because predators are interpreted to react most sensitively to environmental turbulences. The end-Permian mass extinction was the most severe crisis experienced by life on Earth, and the common paradigm persists that the biotic recovery from the extinction event was unusually slow and occurred in a step-wise manner, lasting up to eight to nine million years well into the early Middle Triassic (Anisian) in the oceans, and even longer in the terrestrial realm. Here we survey the global distribution and size spectra of Early Triassic and Anisian marine predatory vertebrates (fishes, amphibians and reptiles) to elucidate the height of trophic pyramids in the aftermath of the end-Permian event. The survey of body size was done by compiling maximum standard lengths for the bony fishes and some cartilaginous fishes, and total size (estimates) for the tetrapods. The distribution and size spectra of the latter are difficult to assess because of preservation artifacts and are thus mostly discussed qualitatively. The data nevertheless demonstrate that no significant size increase of predators is observable from the Early Triassic to the Anisian, as would be expected from the prolonged and stepwise trophic recovery model. The data further indicate that marine ecosystems characterized by multiple trophic levels existed from the earliest Early Triassic onwards. However, a major change in the taxonomic composition of predatory guilds occurred less than two million years after the end-Permian extinction event, in which a transition from fish/amphibian to fish/reptile-dominated higher trophic levels within ecosystems became apparent.

Dataset Information

Evidence of torpor in the tusks of Lystrosaurus from the Early Triassic of Antarctica.

Publications

Evidence of torpor in the tusks of Lystrosaurus from the Early Triassic of Antarctica.

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