Evidence of seasonal torpor in an Early Triassic Antarctic Lystrosaurus.
[sciencythoughts.blogspot.com]
Antarctica is today the coldest and driest continent with extreme variation in light availability throughout the year, restricting vertebrate life to coastal regions and rendering most of the continent uninhabitable. These modern environmental conditions are anomalous, however, considering the deep history of life in Antarctica when flora and fauna occupied large regions of the continent. Although more habitable with a warmer climate than today, Antarctica remained at a high latitudinal position for much of the Phanerozoic, subjecting its inhabitants to extreme photoperiod seasonality. Extant Vertebrates living in highly seasonally variable climates have evolved a variety of mechanisms to curb the effects of regular intervals of stress including daily torpor, hibernation, and brumation. These adaptations are largely behavioral thus rendering them difficult to study directly in the fossil record. Importantly, however, these adaptations reflect underlying metabolic changes in response to resource limitations, and therefore should be recognisable in fossil hard tissues that preserve chronological records of physiology.
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