The Role of Locomotory Ancestry on Secondarily Aquatic Transitions

Abstract

Land-to-sea evolutionary transitions are great transformations where terrestrial amniote clades returned to aquatic environments. These secondarily aquatic amniote clades include charismatic marine mammal and marine reptile groups, as well as countless semi-aquatic forms that modified their terrestrial locomotor anatomy to varying degrees to be suited for swimming via axial and/or appendicular propulsion. The terrestrial ancestors of secondarily aquatic groups would have started off swimming strikingly differently from one another given their evolutionary histories, as inferred by the way modern terrestrial amniotes swim. With such stark locomotor functional differences between reptiles and mammals, we ask if this impacted these transitions. Axial propulsion appears favored by aquatic descendants of terrestrially sprawling quadrupedal reptiles, with exceptions. Appendicular propulsion is more prevalent across the aquatic descendants of ancestrally parasagittal-postured mammals, particularly early transitioning forms. Ancestral terrestrial anatomical differences that precede secondarily aquatic invasions between mammals and reptiles, as well as the distribution of axial and appendicular swimming in secondarily aquatic clades, may indicate that ancestral terrestrial locomotor anatomy played a role, potentially in both constraint and facilitation, in certain aquatic locomotion styles. This perspective of the land-to-sea transition can lead to new avenues of functional, biomechanical, and developmental study of secondarily aquatic transitions.