Tiny Hero Shrews Have the Most Extreme Spine in Nature
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Tiny Hero shrews have the most extreme spine in nature:
The tiny African mammals have an interlocking and highly flexible spine, new x-rays reveal - but they only deepen the intrigue.
When the Mangbetu people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo introduced Western scientists to a smoky-gray, rat-size animal, they told tales of how a grown man could stand on the mammal's back without hurting it.
That was back in 1910, and since then, studies of the animal in question - which came to be called the hero shrew - have cast light on what may account for such lore. (Another species of hero shrew was discovered, also in DRC, in 2013.)
In 2019, scientists led by Stephanie Smith, a mammologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, Illinois, took sophisticated x-rays of hero shrews. The scans showed that these little creatures have a spine unlike any other animal on Earth.
Their vertebrae have thousands of tiny, finger-like projections that allow them to lock into each other while also providing remarkable flexibility. Imagine a mammal that can scrunch up its body like an inchworm, Smith says.
What's more, their vertebrae show signs of being able to withstand greater than normal amounts of force.
"Understanding how small mammals are able to survive gives us a little bit of insight into how modern groups have been able to evolve," says Smith, whose findings were published April 28 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Journal Reference:
Stephanie M. Smith, Kenneth D. Angielczyk. Deciphering an extreme morphology: bone microarchitecture of the hero shrew backbone (Soricidae: Scutisorex) Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.0457
Also at science news.
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