from the maze-of-twisty-vertebrae-all-different dept.
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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 03 2020, @02:22PM (2 children)
The picture is awesome - like some kind of cyborg shrew, or something from Terminator. https://www.sott.net/image/s28/567108/full/content_1588172500_hero_shrew_.jpg [sott.net]
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mhajicek on Sunday May 03 2020, @06:17PM (1 child)
Add that trait to the supersoldier program.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2020, @09:14PM
And my next girlfriend.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2020, @07:15PM (1 child)
To be fair, the Great American spine can adapt to carry up to 400lb of excess body fat which is pretty remarkable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2020, @06:00PM
They did point out that the fusion of some of our spine might actually make us "more unique" than these shrews in the article.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2020, @07:59PM (1 child)
Just the facts, ma'am!
Wow, could you IMAGINE being a mammologist?
Oh my, how much fun you would have.. woooo weeee!
I'm in training for this competitive and coveted position by wrestling with my gay friend Tony from down the block. The only catch is you have to pin your friend with your penis to the anus for 10 seconds then you win. if you "finish" before the count, you lose.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Monday May 04 2020, @02:50AM
I've been known to dabble in mammology, in fact this headline made me wonder about all those model photos I saw on the intertubes where 95% of the ladies constantly have their chest and butt thrust outward, as if they had been left in the sun too long and became permanently warped. Wouldn't it be interesting if the reason for this was that their extreme spinal vertebrae had thousands of tiny, finger-like projections, instead of it just being another case of people with bad taste and dumb ideas ruining everything?