oric domination may t Article
e a culture of gender equality in school. The Network aims ent gender disparity issues and broaden awareness on advantage, and I ’ m sure you are sitting behind your screen wondering ‘ How on earth is having wrinkles helping me? ’ Let me be the one to tell you - it is not. A new evolutionary hypothesis named the ‘ Longevity bottleneck ’ has placed dinosaurs at the center of this aging problem. Professor João Pedro de Magalhães published a study detailing how due to millions of years of dinosaur domination in the Mesozoic era, mammals have undergone an intense evolutionary pressure to rapidly reproduce to increase the chance of survival of the species. This may have led to the loss or inactivation of genes that coded for ‘ long life ’ - such as genes associated with tissue and DNA regeneration and is the reason that we are all wrinkly today. Most mammals have evolved from synapsids which were small, short - lived organisms that were at the bottom of the food chain. Compared to most birds, reptiles and amphibians who originated from the mighty sauropsids, the largest animal during the Mesozoic era. Due to their colossal size, they were more easily able to avoid attacks from predators, leading to a longer, larger lifespan. As synapsids were constantly reproducing and evolving, the genetic information for ‘ long life ’ may have been lost as they typically had shorter lifespans, so the code was not needed anymore. However, at the end of the Cretaceous period where the dinosaurs went extinct, mammals dominated and diversified, where lifespans started to vary from short - lived species to large, longer living species and this is how we ended up with the short end of the stick of life. So, there you have it folks, the dinosaurs are once again the problem. Should have wiped them out sooner!
Evelien David, Year 13
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