The oldest record of aquatic amniote congenital scoliosis

Tomasz Szczygielski; Dawid Surmik; Agnieszka Kapuścińska; Bruce M Rothschild

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0185338

The oldest record of aquatic amniote congenital scoliosis

PLoS One. 2017 Sep 21;12(9):e0185338. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0185338. eCollection 2017.

Authors

Tomasz Szczygielski¹, Dawid Surmik^{2

3}, Agnieszka Kapuścińska¹, Bruce M Rothschild^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Paleobiology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.
² Park of Science & Human Evolution, Krasiejów, Poland.
³ Faculty of Earth Sciences, University of Silesia, Sosnowiec, Poland.
⁴ Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
⁵ West Virginia University School of Medicine, Morgantown, West Virginia, United States of America.

Abstract

We report the first occurrence of congenital scoliosis in an early Permian aquatic parareptile, Stereosternum tumidum from Paraná state, Brazil. The spine malformation is caused by a congenital hemivertebra. These observations give insight into the biomechanical aspects of underwater locomotion in an axial skeleton-compromised aquatic amniote. This is the oldest record of a hemivertebra in an aquatic animal.

MeSH terms

Animals
Biomechanical Phenomena
Geography
Paleontology*
Reptiles*
Scoliosis / congenital*

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the National Science Center (Narodowe Centrum Nauki, www.ncn.gov.pl), Poland, project no. 2011/01/N/ST10/06989 granted to D. Surmik. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study.