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Behavioural adaptations in egg laying ancestors facilitate evolutionary transitions to live birth

Pettersen, A. K.; Feiner, N.; Noble, D. W. A.; While, G. M.; Cornwallis, C. K.; Uller, T.

2021-06-25 evolutionary biology
10.1101/2021.02.07.430163 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Live birth is a key innovation that has evolved from egg laying ancestors over 100 times in reptiles. However, egg-laying lizards and snakes often possess preferred body temperatures that are lethal to developing embryos, which should select against egg retention. Here, we demonstrate that thermal mismatches between mothers and offspring are widespread across the squamate phylogeny. This mismatch is resolved by gravid females adjusting their body temperature towards the thermal optimum of embryos. Importantly, phylogenetic reconstructions suggest this thermoregulatory behaviour evolved in egg-laying species prior to the evolution of live birth. Maternal thermoregulatory behaviour therefore bypasses the constraints imposed by a slowly evolving thermal physiology and has likely been a key facilitator in the repeated transitions to live birth.

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"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.