Imagine a voracious carnivore sinking its teeth into the tail of a small reptile, anticipating a delicious lunch, when, in a flash, the reptile is gone and the carnivore is left holding a wiggling tail between its jaws.
Imagine a voracious carnivore sinking its teeth into the tail of a small reptile, anticipating a delicious lunch, when, in a flash, the reptile is gone and the carnivore is left holding a wiggling tail between its jaws.
A new study by a University of Toronto research team led by Professor Robert Reisz and PhD student Aaron LeBlanc shows how small reptiles that lived 289 million years ago could detach their tails to escape the grasp of predators – the oldest known example of such behaviour. The study was published March 5 in the open source journal Scientific Reports.
The reptiles, called Captorhinus, weighed less than two kilograms – smaller than the predators of the time. They were abundant in terrestrial communities during the Early Permian period and are distant relatives of all the reptiles today.
As small omnivores and herbivores, Captorhinus and its relatives had to scrounge for food while avoiding being preyed upon by large, meat-eating amphibians and ancient relatives of mammals. “One of the ways captorhinids could do this was by having breakable tail vertebrae,” says lead author LeBlanc. “Like many present-day lizard species, such as skinks, that can detach their tails to escape or distract a predator, the middle of many tail vertebrae had cracks in them."
Continue reading at University of Toronto
Image via University of Toronto
