Frilled dragon lizard (Chlamydosaurus kingii). Image credit: Matt Clancy (CC BY 2.0)
In Jurassic Park, while the computer programmer Dennis Nedry attempts to smuggle dinosaur embryos off the island, he gets attacked and killed by a mid-sized dinosaur that erects a frightening neck frill. This fictional dinosaur is clearly inspired from a real animal known as the ‘frilled dragon’, that lives today in northern Australia and southern New Guinea.
These lizards, also known as Chlamydosaurus kingii, have a large disc of skin that sits around their head and neck. This frill is usually folded back against the body, but can spread in a spectacular fashion to scare off predators and competitors. Folding of the left and right side of the frill occurs at three pre-formed ridges. But, it remains unclear which ancestral structure evolved to become the dragon’s frill, and how the ridges in the frill form during development.
Now, Montandon, Fofonjka, and Milinkovitch show that the dragon’s frill, as well as the bone and cartilage that support it, develop from a part of the embryo known as the branchial arches. These are a series of bands of tissue in the embryo that evolved to become the gill supports in fish, and that now give rise to multiple structures in the ear and neck of land vertebrates. In most species, the second branchial arch will eventually fuse with the arches behind it. But in the frilled dragon, this arch instead continues to expand, leading to the formation of the dragon’s spectacular frill.
As the frill develops, the front side of the skin forms three successive folds, which make up the pre-formed ridges. Studying the formation of these ridges revealed that they do not emerge from increased growth at the folding sites, but from physical forces – whereby the growth of the frill is constrained by its attachment to the neck. This causes the top layer to buckle, creating the folds of the frill. Montandon, Fofonjka, and Milinkovitch then simulated this mechanism of growth in a computer model and found it could recapitulate how folds develop in the frill of real lizard embryos.
These results provide further evidence that physical processes, as well as genetic programs, can shape tissues and organs during an embryo’s development. Furthermore, changes in how the branchial arches develop between lizard species highlights how evolution is able to ‘recycle’ old structures into new shapes with different roles.
