• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How The Platypus Lost Its Stomach

July 3, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Among all the other strange things about the platypus, only the very observant notice that it also barely has a stomach. Short-beaked echidnas share some of the unusual traits of the platypus digestive system as well. Now, a genetic study of the two monotreme species has provided some insight into the timing of this development, indicating their common ancestor probably lived a semi-aquatic lifestyle like the platypus today.

Advertisement

A stomach is such a useful body part that almost all living vertebrates have one with certain common features, although ruminants famously have found subdividing makes them better still. Monotremes are among the rare exceptions. Although not lacking stomachs entirely, both have organs quite different from those of other vertebrates, inspiring University of Adelaide PhD student Jackson Dann to wonder how they got that way.

Advertisement

“The platypus stomach is small, amorphic, glandless, and it lacks a pyloric sphincter, making it notably hard to distinguish from the oesophagus and intestines,” Dann and co-authors wrote in a paper exploring monotremes’ stomach-related genetics.

The short-beaked echidna has taken a different path. It has a bulbous stomach, with a restriction to regulate the flow of food and gastric juices to the duodenum, but it also lacks glands or acid to break down its food. Then again, when your diet is made up of ants, the acid comes pre-supplied. Long-beaked echidnas, being restricted to New Guinea, and therefore much harder to study, were not investigated, but are probably similar to their short-beaked cousins in this regard.

The commonalities between the stomachs of other mammals and reptiles indicate that when the ancestral monotremes branched off the main mammalian line, they had stomachs much like our own. Dann and co-authors conclude the basis of the difference is the non-expression of the Nkx3.2 gene. The accumulation of neutral mutations on this part of the genome suggests neither species has used it for a very long time.

The few other vertebrate lineages also known to have stopped using conventional stomachs, such as the Japanese pufferfish, are all aquatic or semi-aquatic, making echidnas very much the odd species out. Therefore, the authors argue the change probably occurred in an ancestor living a lifestyle similar to the modern platypus well over a hundred million years ago. 

Advertisement

This may help settle the long-standing question as to which of its descendants the ancestral monotreme more closely resembled. Quite why some water-dwelling creatures find a stomach an encumbrance, when most make use of it, is not known, nor why echidnas didn’t evolve more features back when they redeveloped a large holding place in their digestive system.

The study is open access in Open Biology.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Bolivian president calls for global debt relief for poor countries
  2. Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via FoodTech
  3. Humanity’s Journey To A Metal-Rich Asteroid Launches Today. Here’s How To Watch
  4. Ancient DNA Reveals People Caught Leprosy From Adorable Woodland Critters In Medieval England

Source Link: How The Platypus Lost Its Stomach

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • For Only The Second Recorded Time, Two Novae Are Visible With The Naked Eye At Once
  • Long-Lost Ancient Egyptian City Ruled By Cobra Goddess Discovered In Nile Delta
  • Much Maligned Norwegian Lemming Is One Of The Newest Mammal Species On Earth
  • Where Are The Real Geographical Centers Of All The Continents?
  • New Species Of South African Rain Frog Discovered, And It’s Absolutely Fuming About It
  • Love Cheese But Hate Nightmares? Bad News, It Looks Like The Two Really Are Related
  • Project Hail Mary Trailer First Look: What Would Happen If The Sun Got Darker?
  • Newly Discovered Cell Structure Might Hold Key To Understanding Devastating Genetic Disorders
  • What Is Kakeya’s Needle Problem, And Why Do We Want To Solve It?
  • “I Wasn’t Prepared For The Sheer Number Of Them”: Cave Of Mummified Never-Before-Seen Eyeless Invertebrates Amazes Scientists
  • Asteroid Day At 10: How The World Is More Prepared Than Ever To Face Celestial Threats
  • What Happened When A New Zealand Man Fell Butt-First Onto A Powerful Air Hose
  • Ancient DNA Confirms Women’s Unexpected Status In One Of The Oldest Known Neolithic Settlements
  • Earth’s Weather Satellites Catch Cloud Changes… On Venus
  • Scientists Find Common Factors In People Who Have “Out-Of-Body” Experiences
  • Shocking Photos Reveal Extent Of Overfishing’s Impact On “Shrinking” Cod
  • Direct Fusion Drive Could Take Us To Sedna During Its Closest Approach In 11,000 Years
  • Earth’s Energy Imbalance Is More Than Double What It Should Be – And We Don’t Know Why
  • We May Have Misjudged A Fundamental Fact About The Cambrian Explosion
  • The Shoebill Is A Bird So Bizarre That Some People Don’t Even Believe It’s Real
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version