Recent analysis of reptile gastrulation (Coolen et al., 2008; Bertocchini et al., 2013) revealed an intermediate gastrulation form consisting of a blastopore in addition to a blastoporal plate, a broad posterior structure considered to be homologous to the primitive streak (Gilland and Burke, 2004).
This study also provided a platform for comparative analysis of reptilian sex chromosomes, not only with other reptiles but with vertebrates in general.
MC designed the research, analyzed the genomes and the gene sequences of the vertebrates; RC performed the analysis on reptile and amphibian sequences, and helped in the final analysis.
A long-term analysis of amphibians and reptiles in a Costa Rican nature reserve designed to protect them reveals an alarming fall in numbers.
We may need to improve the methods of finding and masking repeat sequences for robust analysis of data from reptiles and common ancestors of mammals and birds.
Consistent with these studies, a meta-analysis [33] revealed that species of reptiles and amphibians from temperate-zone areas of the Northern Hemisphere tend to be younger (in term of the age of earliest intraspecific diversification) than are taxa found at similar latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere.
The team extended the same methods of analysis to amphibians, reptiles, birds, plants, mollusks, and other forms of life.
These four reptilian clades diverged early in amniote evolution, around 250−280 million years ago (Hugall et al. 2007), and thus analysis of MHC structure in nonavian reptiles will fill an important gap in reconstructing the evolutionary history of the amniote MHC.
Differences between richness and assemblage results may have been related to low detections of reptiles because our non-metric multi-dimensional scaling analysis, which only included species with >1 detection, revealed less obvious differences among reptile assemblages by aquatic system type.
Joseph Skorupa, the service's selenium expert, cited a "lack of valid field controls" and the absence of any analysis of the selenium's impact on reptiles, birds or the 12 other types of fish in the creeks' waters.
