A study published this week in Nature Communications reveals new insights into penguin evolution. The work, carried out by experts from more than 30 institutions around the world, helps to understand how they adapted to the marine environment.
Over time, these animals have developed a set of morphological, physiological and behavioral characteristics that make them one of the most specialized families of birds that exist today and that have allowed them to colonize some of the most extreme environments of the Earth. Land.
They reconstruct the evolutionary history of penguins with genomic data. Genes involved in thermoregulation, oxygenation, diving, vision, diet and body size have been identified that would have facilitated their adaptation to the aquatic world
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Penguins originated more than 60 million years ago. Although they are usually associated with Antarctica, long before the formation of the polar ice caps they had already lost the ability to fly and had developed the ability to dive using their wings.
Previous studies have provided information on the evolution and diversification of these animals, but have been limited by sampling problems (for example, the number of lineages included) and by not integrating extinct species.
Because nearly three-quarters of known penguin species are represented solely by fossils, samples of extinct animals are crucial to understanding their evolution and adaptation to environmental context.
Adaptation to the aquatic environment
The authors of the study have analyzed genomic data from all existing lineages and from other recently extinct ones and have combined them with information obtained from fossils, in order to reconstruct the evolutionary history of penguins.
The research shows that the diversification of these animals was driven by global climate oscillations between cold and warm periods. Due to these changes in climate, populations of different species first shrank and then expanded throughout the Southern Ocean.
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Source: SINC
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