Ontogenetic Shape Change in the Chicken Brain: Implications for Paleontology.

Soichiro Kawabe,Hideki Endo,Naoki Tsunekawa,Seiji Matsuda,Peter Dodson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129939

Abstract

Paleontologists have investigated brain morphology of extinct birds with little information on post-hatching changes in avian brain morphology. Without the knowledge of ontogenesis, assessing brain morphology in fossil taxa could lead to misinterpretation of the phylogeny or neurosensory development of extinct species. Hence, it is imperative to determine how avian brain morphology changes during post-hatching growth. In this study, chicken brain shape was compared at various developmental stages using three-dimensional (3D) geometric morphometric analysis and the growth rate of brain regions was evaluated to explore post-hatching morphological changes. Microscopic MRI (μMRI) was used to acquire in vivo data from living and post-mortem chicken brains. The telencephalon rotates caudoventrally during growth. This change in shape leads to a relative caudodorsal rotation of the cerebellum and myelencephalon. In addition, all brain regions elongate rostrocaudally and this leads to a more slender brain shape. The growth rates of each brain region were constant and the slopes from the growth formula were parallel. The dominant pattern of ontogenetic shape change corresponded with interspecific shape changes due to increasing brain size. That is, the interspecific and ontogenetic changes in brain shape due to increased size have similar patterns. Although the shape of the brain and each brain region changed considerably, the volume ratio of each brain region did not change. This suggests that the brain can change its shape after completing functional differentiation of the brain regions. Moreover, these results show that consideration of ontogenetic changes in brain shape is necessary for an accurate assessment of brain morphology in paleontological studies.

Highlights

The organ shape of extant and extinct vertebrate animals changes during maturation or with increases in size, and the cranial part is of particular interest to many researchers [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
Can we develop arguments on the brain morphology of extinct species without knowledge of the variation in the shape of the brain during growth? It is noted that brain shape changes considerably based on brain size in birds [39]
The telencephalon rotates caudoventrally with increasing PC1 score (Fig 4). This change in shape leads to a relative caudodorsal rotation of the cerebellum and myelencephalon

Summary

Introduction

The organ shape of extant and extinct vertebrate animals changes during maturation or with increases in size, and the cranial part is of particular interest to many researchers [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Paleontologists are usually forced to discuss the phylogeny or neurosensory development based on the brain morphology of an extinct species without consideration of the size or developmental stage of the specimen [24, 29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38]. Can we develop arguments on the brain morphology of extinct species without knowledge of the variation in the shape of the brain during growth? Given the pattern of shape change based on size, the brain of some species should change shape from the round to the anteroposteriorly elongated type during ontogeny. Since the morphological characters that show ontogenetic change contain phylogenetic signals and can affect the results of phylogenetic analyses [40,41,42,43], it is imperative we know how avian brain shape changes during growth

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