Major
Biology
Access Type
Restricted Access
Abstract
Nearly 350 million years ago, early tetrapods made a critical transition from living in water to living on land. How this transition happened remains relatively unknown in vertebrate evolution. To better understand how early tetrapods may have spent time on land during their lifetimes, I examined a growth series of femora from an early Australian tetrapod, Ossinodus. My preliminary results indicate that trabecular bone varies between the life stages of Ossinodus. The implication of this difference may reveal that this early tetrapod spent different parts of its life in water and on land.
Faculty Mentors & Instructors
Megan Whitney
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Trabecular development in a growth series of the early tetrapod Ossinodus with implications for the water-to-land transition.
Nearly 350 million years ago, early tetrapods made a critical transition from living in water to living on land. How this transition happened remains relatively unknown in vertebrate evolution. To better understand how early tetrapods may have spent time on land during their lifetimes, I examined a growth series of femora from an early Australian tetrapod, Ossinodus. My preliminary results indicate that trabecular bone varies between the life stages of Ossinodus. The implication of this difference may reveal that this early tetrapod spent different parts of its life in water and on land.