Credit...Crystal Shin
The New York Times "Trilobites" column has a story about hibernation... ancient hibernation. Behavior is rarely preserved in the fossil record, but sometimes researchers can find clues that can help to tease out the details of life on early many, many years ago. In this case, modern techniques like paleo bone histology led to the conclusion that Lystrosaurs hibernated, probably during the winter. Read all the details in the journal Communications Biology.
How to tell if something that died 250 million years ago hibernated when it was alive?
After all, hibernation — a state of reduced metabolism — is a good strategy for making it through long, harsh winters when food can be scarce. Biologists would not be surprised that evolution figured this out early in the history of life. But uncovering convincing evidence of that is hard.
“As a paleontologist, what you’re presented with is a pile of bones,” said Christian A. Sidor, a professor of biology at the University of Washington and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum in Seattle. “And that just tells you where the animal died. It doesn’t even tell you where the animal lived.”
But Dr. Sidor and Megan R. Whitney, a former graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, believe they have good evidence of hibernation behavior in an animal that lived in Antarctica a quarter of a billion years ago — before the age of dinosaurs.
