#Chitonida (#Mollusca) exist since the #Cambrian. Bodies are covered with #calcareous #plates, flexibly connected. Most feed on vegetation cover. The #CambrianExplosion made based i.a. on #oxygen significant leaps in #animalevolution. Y. Zhang et al. (2025) assume a change in Earth's orbit altering #solarradiation, leading to land #weathering and #nutrients flow to the sea. Algae thrived and produced much oxygen.
© #StefanFWirth 2025

Ref
https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL118689

#Pics
#AIassisted, © S.F.Wirth

A new review reveals that some animals are shapeshifting to cope with climate change. They are growing larger beaks, legs, and ears to regulate their body temperature better. This shows that animals are evolving rapidly, but not necessarily successfully, in response to the warming planet.

#Shapeshifting #ClimateChange #AnimalEvolution

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/climate-change-is-causing-animals-to-shapeshift?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=HariTulsidas%2Fmagazine%2FArchetypes

A study published in Nature by researchers from the University of Vienna and MBARI, and their collaborators, sheds new light on one of the earliest points in animal evolution, which occurred more than 700 million years ago:

"In the new study, a team of researchers from MBARI, the University of Vienna, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, mapped sets of genes that are always found together on a single chromosome, in everything from humans and hamsters to crabs and corals, to provide clear evidence that comb jellies are the sibling group to all other animals. Understanding the relationships among animals will help shape our thinking about how key features of animal anatomy, such as the nervous system or digestive tract, have evolved over time."

🔗: https://www.sflorg.com/2023/05/es05172303.html

#genetics #evolution
#AnimalEvolution #EvolutionaryBiology #biology #science

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq5158

"The brain regions associated with emotional contagion in zebrafish are homologous to those involved in the same process in rodents (e.g., striatum, lateral septum), receiving direct projections from oxytocinergic neurons located in the pre-optic area. Together, our results support an evolutionary conserved role for oxytocin as a key regulator of basic empathic behaviors across vertebrates."

#empathy #emotionalIntelligence #oxytocin #vertebrates #animalEvolution

"Together, our findings suggest that the temporal decoupling of head and trunk formation, as maximally observed in head larvae, facilitated larval evolution in Bilateria. This diverges from prevailing scenarios that propose either co-option or innovation of gene regulatory programmes to explain larva and adult origins"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05636-7#:~:text=Together%2C%20our%20findings,and%20adult%20origins

#bilateria #bilateralSymmetry #symmetry #animalEvolution #evolution #annelids #developmentalBiology #devbio #genetics #transcriptomics #epigenetics