Placentation in the pronghorn (Antilocapra americana)

Pregnant uterus of the pronghorn. Note the fused amnions in the corpus uteri.
From Wislocki and Fawcett Bull Museum Comp Zool Harvard 1949; 101: 545-559.

The pronghorn is the sole survivor of a North American lineage of ruminants. (Antilocapridae). Its placenta was described by Wislocki and Fawcett (full text available at Biodiversity Heritage Library). It is polycotyledonary and epitheliochorial. The chorionic villi show a pattern of branching distinct from that of other ruminants. Interestingly, Wislocki and Fawcett described and illustrated binucleate giant cells. The amnion is larger than the allantoic sac. There is a fetus in each horn of the bicornuate uterus and the two amnions fuse back to back in the region of the uterine corpus.

Female pronghorn in Wyoming.
Photo by Yathin S Krishnappa Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

The pronghorn bears a superficial resemblance to an antelope, but this is the result of convergent evolution. Pronghorns (Antilocapridae) share a common ancestor with the giraffe and okapi (Giraffidae) whereas Bovidae (including antelopes) is a distinct lineage. The evolution of placentation in even-toed ungulates has been traced by Andrea Mess and Karl Klisch (here).

Given the taxonomic position of the pronghorn, a recent study has examined glycosylation at the fetal maternal interface and compared it with the giraffe, okapi and various bovids (here). The expression of pregnancy-associated glycoproteins (PAGs) in binucleate trophoblast cells was also examined.

Embryo competition in the pronghorn: penetration of the membranes
of a distal embryo by the necrotic tip of a proximal embryo.
From O'Gara Amer J Anat 1969; 125: 217-232. 

Several authors have noted that the number of corpora lutea exceeds the number of fetuses (usually twins). O'Gara (reference here) found that some reduction occurred during the phase of blastocyst elongation. Often two blastocysts managed to implant in the same horn. However, the membranes of the proximal embryo (nearest the uterine body) formed a necrotic tip. As the conceptus grew, this tip pierced the chorion and allantois of the distal embryo, resulting in its death. As O'Gara wrote, "The phenomenom of the necrotic tip acting as a lethal weapon is apparently unique to the pronghorn."

Physiology of dinosaurs

Barosauras lentus rearing: mounted skeleton at AMNH
Photo by Greg CC BY 2.0 

In a previous post I discussed the increase in brain metabolic rate during hominin evolution. Roger Seymour, who co-authored that study, has used similar insights to analyse the cardiovascular physiology of sauropod dinosaurs (open access). 

One of his conclusions is that if Barosaurus reared its head (as in the exhibit above) its mean arterial blood pressure would have been 700 mmHg and the left ventricle of the heart would have weighed a metric ton. The heart would have filled the chest and its thick wall been so stiff as to consume a huge amount of energy.

Diplodocus carnegii in the hall of the Natural History Museum in
South Kensington (now removed). Photo by Drow male CC BY-SA 4.0

Seymour goes so far to suggest that long-necked sauropods like Diplodocus were aquatic, floating on the surface of the water and lowering their heads to browse on vegetation. Abdominal air sacs would have helped it to float.

Sauropods are generally regarded as terrestial because of skeletal features, but perhaps they retained these because they needed to go on land to lay their eggs!

Dinocephalosaurus a live-bearing archosauromorph
From Liu et al. 2017

Large reptiles that became fully aquatic were viviparous as shown in a recent paper by Liu et al. (open access). This particular example was an archosauromorph and thus in the lineage that gave rise to dinosaurs (including birds) and crocodilians.

Prothero's Guide to Prehistoric Mammals

Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691156828

This is an admirable effort to teach extinct mammals by showing them in  context with extant species. I found it helpful to view fossil skulls and skeletons alongside photos of familiar animals. As an additional aid, most chapters have one or more phylogenetic trees culled from the recent literature. Of course, there are extinct orders with a tenuous connection to living ones; inevitably a long chapter deals with orders that do not fit any scheme (e.g. Dinocerata).

Skeleton of Eobasileus - from the Order Dinocerata,
which is difficult to place in the mammalian tree.
Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie Comparée, Paris.

Donald R. Prothero is an experienced author and has penned a well written and informative text. The illustrations by Mary Persis Williams reconstruct the body forms of prehistoric mammals, usually with several in the same figure and with a human silhouette to give a sense of scale. These drawings are quite restrained compared to those of Velizar Simeonovski in Horned Armadillos and Extinct Madagascar (the cover is an exception).

Skeleton of the huge hedgehog Deinogalerix koenigswaldi.
National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, the Netherlands
Photo by Peter Maas (CC BY-SA 3.0) 

The book is aimed at a broad readership as "Princeton Field Guide" might suggest. The publishers have encouraged depiction of large and spectacular mammals at the expense of smaller ones. There is poor coverage of rodents. On the other hand it is the large fossils that are on display in museums of natural history.

Reconstruction of the ground sloth Eremotherium.
Exhibit in the Fernbank Museum of Natural History,
Atlanta, Georgia. Photo by Daderot (CC0)

Indeed, a field guide to fossils might be useful on museum visits. Yet though there are many excellent photos of exhibits, the museums are not identified. The two pages of Illustration Credits are of little help. The credit line to the above Eremotherium figure is merely "Daderot/Wikimedia Commons."

Figures showing phylogenetic trees suffer from a similar deficiency. One from the rodent chapter is credited to E.T. Prothero. It is redrawn from a paper on the Laotian rock rat (Laonastes) by Huchon et al. (here). The reader is ill served by not being guided to the source papers.

Caecilian offspring feed on the skin or oviduct lining of the mother

A caecilian (Dermophis mexicanus)
Franco Andreone CC BY-SA 2.5

Caecilians are limbless amphibians with a burrowing lifestyle. There are oviparous and viviparous species. In the former there is an extended period of parental care. The hatchlings have sharp teeth which they use to feed on the outer layer of the parent's skin. Because skin feeding occurs in both African and South American species, it probably was evolved more than 100 million years ago (argued here).

Viviparous species take it one step further. The fetuses have teeth and feed on the hypertrophied lining of the oviduct (described here). This is just one of several forms of matrotrophy practiced by invertebrates (here) and vertebrates (here).

Slow incubation of dinosaur eggs: why only birds survived

Cast of Mossospondylus eggs and embryo
Photo from Royal Ontario Museum by Daderot (CC)

Most people have heard that birds are dinosaurs. But that raises an obvious question: why did birds survive the end-Cretaceous mass extinction event that did for their non-avian kin? A paper just published in PNAS suggests this might be explained by different reproductive strategies.

Reconstruction of Protoceratops andrewsi
AntoninJury (Wikimedia Commons) CC BY-SA 4.0

In brief, the authors made CT scans of teeth from fossilized dinosaur embryos. They then counted the von Ebner lines, which reflect the incremental pattern of dentine formation. Applying some quite reasonable assumptions to the data, they estimated the incubation time of the dinosaur eggs as minimum 2.8 months for Protoceratops andrewsi and 5.8 months for Hypachrosaurus stebingeri. The incubation times of modern birds tend to be much shorter though the upper end of the range (11-85 days) overlaps with P. andrewsi.

It is suggested that the relatively long generation times of non-avian dinosaurs put them at a disadvantage in competing with birds, reptiles and mammals during the Cretaceous-Palaeogene transition.

Carnegie Collection of human embryos

Carnegie embryo 8171. Early lacunar stage (Stage 5b)
Courtesy of Dr. Allen C. Enders

An important source for human embryology, including implantation and formation of the placenta, is the Carnegie Collection now housed at the Human Developmental Anatomy Center in Washington D.C. The core of this collection is the carefully dated series of embryos first described by Hertig, Rock and Adams (here).

The Virtual Human Embryo is an online ressource based on the serially sectioned embryos in this collection and includes 3D reconstructions. It covers all 23 Carnegie stages in the first 8 weeks of embryonic development and cannot be too highly recommended.

Carnegie Embryo 7801. Showing extraembryonic coelom (eec)
and secondary yolk sac (sys) (Stage 6)
Courtesy of Dr.Allen C. Enders

Now a group in Amsterdam has used the Carnegie Collection to develop an additional annotated digital atlas of human development (described here). They also utilized material from the Boyd Collection at the Centre for Trophoblast Research in Cambridge.

They make two claims. First that representations in textbooks have become increasingly schematic. This is demonstrably true. Second that the descriptions in standard texts are often based on extrapolation to humans from animal models. It is hard to assess if the latter truly is the case. For example Human Embryology by Hamilton, Boyd and Mossman (previous post) was based on the human embryos in the possession of the three authors. In Germany there was a strong tradition to cover the embryology of all vertebrates, concluding with the human, exemplified by Dietrich Starck's Embryologie.

In physiology, on the other hand, animal data often are presented as if they were human. One example concerns oxygen tensions in various parts of the fetal circulation. Pretty much every textbook of physiology has a large illustration of the fetal circulation with data obtained in sheep by Dawes, Mott and Widdicombe. The figure legends often fail to acknowledge the source or the species or both.

Congratulations Camilla Whittington

Camilla Whittington with sea horses University of Sydney

Viviparity and pregnancy has evolved numerous times and Camilla Whittington has set herself the ambitious task to seek similarities in gene expression that support pregnancy in sea horses, viviparous lizards and marsupial mammals. Her paper on the transcriptome of the brood pouch of a male sea horse was highlighted in a previous post.

Now I am delighted to report that Camilla has been awarded a Fondation L'Oréal Women in Science Fellowship. It is good that this award exists and especially encouraging that research in comparative biology of pregnancy has become known to a wider public through the publicity surrounding Camilla's Award.

Sea horses from Camilla's web site

To learn more about Camilla's Work visit her web site. For hard science you can read about the comparative genomics of hormone signalling in the chorioallantoic membrane here.