ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Effects of body plan evolution on the hydrodynamic drag and energy requirements of swimming in ichthyosaurs.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Raptorial appendages of the Cambrian apex predatorProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Developmental and functional controls on enrolment in an ancient, extinct arthropod.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Dietary niche partitioning in Early Jurassic ichthyosaurs from Strawberry Bank.Journal of anatomy · 2022Article
- A forgotten element of the blue economy: marine biomimetics and inspiration from the deep sea.PNAS nexus · 2022Review
- Large size in aquatic tetrapods compensates for high drag caused by extreme body proportions.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Body-axis organization in tetrapods: a model-system to disentangle the developmental origins of convergent evolution in deep time.Biology letters · 2022Review
- Phylogeny and foraging behaviour shape modular morphological variation in bat humeri.Journal of anatomy · 2021Article
- Body dimensions of the extinct giant shark Otodus megalodon: a 2D reconstruction.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
- Effects of body plan evolution on the hydrodynamic drag and energy requirements of swimming in ichthyosaurs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ichthyosaurs are an extinct group of fully marine tetrapods that were well adapted to aquatic locomotion. During their approximately 160 Myr existence, they evolved from elongate and serpentine forms into stockier, fish-like animals, convergent with sharks and dolphins. Here, we use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to quantify the impact of this transition on the energy demands of ichthyosaur swimming for the first time. We run computational simulations of water flow using three-dimensional digital models of nine ichthyosaurs and an extant functional analogue, a bottlenose dolphin, providing the first quantitative evaluation of ichthyosaur hydrodynamics across phylogeny. Our results show that morphology did not have a major effect on the drag coefficient or the energy cost of steady swimming through geological time. We show that even the early ichthyosaurs produced low levels of drag for a given volume, comparable to those of a modern dolphin, and that deep 'torpedo-shaped' bodies did not reduce the cost of locomotion. Our analysis also provides important insight into the choice of scaling parameters for CFD applied to swimming mechanics, and underlines the great influence of body size evolution on ichthyosaur locomotion. A combination of large bodies and efficient swimming modes lowered the cost of steady swimming as ichthyosaurs became increasingly adapted to a pelagic existence.
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