Early tetrapods had surprisingly little ability to move their necks | EurekAlert!
A new model has made it possible to estimate how the backbones of some of the first animals on land could and could not move using sturgeon as a material analogue. These results disprove a long-standing hypothesis that changes in early tetrapod anatomy as they moved onto land gave them improved neck mobility. The study, led by a researcher at Uppsala University, formerly of Carleton University in Canada, has been published in the journal Nature.