Where do elbows and knees come from? Biologists track them back to our boneless, sharklike ancestors

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Joints in jaws and limbs, once thought to have evolved for life on land, turn out to date back much earlier, to sharks and their relatives

The existence of this pelvic synovial joint in a skate suggests these joints were shared with our common ancestor with them.Ask an older person where painful arthritis strikes and most will point to their joints—knees, hips, and fingers. That’s because as people age, those joints lose the cartilage and viscous fluid, known as synovial fluid, that keeps them supple. Sharks and skates have no bones—and no arthritis—but they apparently have the same kind of joints we do.

That was the accepted wisdom until 2016, when Crump and his colleagues found genetic evidence that bony fish—which evolved about 410 million years ago, also have these joints. The When postdoctoral fellow Neelima Sharma joined Shubin’s lab 2 years ago, she resolved to learn more. So, she looked for these joints in three animals thought to represent earlier evolving vertebrates: the little skate , which is also made of cartilage, but is jawless. She and another Shubin postdoc, Yara Haridy, conducted micro–computerized tomography scans of little skate embryos at 20, 28, and more than 30 weeks old.

 

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