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Prenatal Brain-Body Allometry in Mammals.

Andrew C Halley1

  • 1University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, Calif., USA.

Brain, Behavior and Evolution
|August 27, 2016
PubMed
Summary

Primate prenatal development uniquely drives relative brain size through altered embryonic growth, not maternal factors. This prenatal encephalization is a hallmark of the primate order, emerging early in development.

Area of Science:

  • Evolutionary Biology
  • Comparative Anatomy
  • Developmental Biology

Background:

  • Mammalian relative brain size varies due to differing brain and body growth patterns during development.
  • Fetal development is crucial for generating this diversity, with prenatal physiology factors like maternal metabolic rate and placental morphology previously implicated.
  • Primates exhibit unique encephalization during fetal development, but the timing and universality across primate groups are unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the emergence and prevalence of primate prenatal encephalization across mammalian radiations.
  • To re-examine the role of physiological and life history variables in fetal brain-body allometry.
  • To identify specific characteristics of primate prenatal encephalization.

Main Methods:

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  • Compiled data on the fetal rapid growth phase (RGP) of brain-body allometry for 12 primate and 16 nonprimate species.
  • Included later ontogenetic data for 16 additional species and neonatal proportions for a larger sample.
  • Analyzed the predictive power of relative basal metabolic rate (BMR), litter size, altriciality, and placental morphology on RGP slopes.

Main Results:

  • Maternal relative BMR, litter size, altriciality, and placental morphology did not predict RGP slopes, suggesting they do not constrain fetal brain growth.
  • These factors were associated with birth timing differences along allometric trajectories.
  • Prenatal encephalization is a unique characteristic of all primate radiations, involving early embryonic brain/body proportion changes and higher RGP allometric slopes due to slower fetal body growth.

Conclusions:

  • Prenatal encephalization is unique to the primate order and is characterized by an early embryonic shift in brain/body proportions and distinct RGP allometric slopes.
  • While high allometric slopes occur in nonprimates, only primates show an intercept shift at 1g body size.
  • Primate prenatal encephalization likely results from poorly understood early changes in embryonic neural and somatic tissue growth.