New paper on vertebral regionalization in cetaceans

The first results of the Back2Sea project are now available in our recent research paper published in Nature Communications.

Using morphological data from more than 7,500 vertebrae of 62 different species of modern cetaceans, we demonstrate that the cetacean backbone is still highly regionalized. However, the regionalization pattern is drastically different from the pattern traditionally found in terrestrial mammals pointing at a repatterning of the organization of the backbone during the land-to-water transition. We summarize this new cetacean-specific pattern in the Nested Regions hypothesis.

Our new findings are featured on Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology webiste. and on the Springer Nature Research Communities

This project was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101023931