Ancient skin sported intricately patterned scales

Plikus, Maksim V.

doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00587-7

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06 March 2024

Ancient skin sported intricately patterned scales

The discovery of 285-million-year-old fossils of intricately patterned animal scales indicates that evolutionary tinkering of armoured skin started at the dawn of life on dry land as aquatic vertebrates adapted for terrestrial survival.

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Maksim V. Plikus ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8845-2559⁰

Maksim V. Plikus
1. Maksim V. Plikus is in the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92697, USA.
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What type of skin did early land-dwelling vertebrates have? Writing in Current Biology, Mooney et al.¹ present fossil evidence that sheds light on this. Their findings have implications for scientists’ understanding of the evolution of pattern formation and the emergence of scales on body surfaces.

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Nature 627, 274-276 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00587-7

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