LYSTOSAURUS,HIBERNATION & IMMUNE SYSTEM BOOSTER

 HIBERNATION & COVID-19 IMMUNE:

LYSTOSAURUS,HIBERNATION & IMMUNE SYSTEM BOOSTER

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If we can figure out how to get the same biological trick working in humans, it may provide us new ways of fighting disease.

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In  1967, New Zealand geologists mapping 240 millions years old Triassic rocks in the desolate interior of Antarctica stumbled upon some fragmentary bones. A few months later they brought the fragments to paleontologist Edwin  Colbert for identification. E. Colbert was in the process of retiring after 40 years as Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and relocating to the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. He wasn’t ready for this surprise. He recognized the bones as an extinct labyrinthodont amphibian, so named for details in their characteristic teeth. Like modern frogs and salamanders, these distant relatives from the Permian and Triassic Periods could never have swum across the cold, salty water of the Antarctic Sea from other southern continents, nor survived the frozen landscape of Antarctica. E. Colbert and colleague- paleontologists had struggled with the new ideas of drifting continents, but he knew instantly this discovery would be a decisive, paleontological blow to the long-held theory of fixed continents.

Animals have been hibernating for a million years, a new study shows. Researchers have analysed 250 million-year-old fossils and discovered evidence that the pig-sized mammal relation, a genus referred to as Lystrosaurus, hibernated much like bears and bats do today. Finding signs of shifts in metabolism rates in fossils is about impossible under ordinary conditions, however, the stout, four-legged Lystrosaurus had a pair of tusks that grew continually during its life and leaving behind a record of activity which is not dissimilar to tree trunk rings. By evaluating cross-sections of tusks from six Antarctic Lystrosaurus to cross-sections of tusks from 4 Lystrosaurus from South Africa, the researchers had been able to locate periods of less growth and increased stress that have been exclusive to the Antarctica samples.

 

The marks match up with similar depositions in the teeth of modern day animals that hibernate at certain factors during the year. This is not definitive proof that Lystrosaurus hibernated, but it is  the oldest proof of it we have found till date."Animals that live at or near the poles have usually had to cope with the more harsh and extreme environments present there," says vertebrate palaeontologist Megan Whitney, from Harvard University. "These preliminary findings indicate that getting into into a hibernation-like state is not a relatively new type of adaptation. This is an historic one." The hibernation state, or torpor, may well have been essential for animals living close to the South Pole at that time. Though the region was much warmer in the Triassic period, there would still have been big seasonal variations in the number of daylight hours. This is   possible that Lystrosaurus was not  only hibernating animal of the time, and some of the dinosaurs that came afterwards may well have hibernated too. "In order to observe the peculiar signs of stress brought on by hibernation, you need to appear at something that can fossilize and was growing continuously during the animal's life," says biologist Christian Sidor, from the University of Washington. "Many animals do not hibernate even in harsh seasons, but luckily Lystrosaurus did." The evolutionary history of species, lending support to the idea that a flexible physiology  being able to adapt bodily functions to suit the seasons  may be fundamental characteristic for surviving periods of mass extinction.

Scientists continue to discover more about how hibernation works and how it can be brought about in animals. If we can figure out how to get the same biological trick working in humans, it may provide us new ways of fighting disease.Further studies will be able to appear in more detail at the question of whether or no longer the Lystrosaurus was able to enter a deep state of torpor, but this new evaluation is already drawing some interesting parallels that span hundreds of millions of years. Cold-blooded animals  shut down their metabolism completely during a non-favorable season, but many  warm-blooded animals that hibernate frequently reactivate their metabolism for the duration of the hibernation period. It is  observed in the Antarctic Lystrosaurus tusks fits a pattern of small metabolic reactivation events during a period of stress, which is most similar to what we see in warm-blooded hibernators today.

 

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