Did crocodiles become secondarily ectothermic ? : a paleohistological approach

Archosaurs are a clade of vertebrates that includes birds, crocodiles, and numerous fossil groups. This clade has been a matter of debate among paleontologists for decades concerning the evolution of thermometabolism in its different lineages. The classical hypothesis considers that only modern birds are true endotherms, whereas all other archosaurs are ectotherms. Bone histology allows to study several traits linked to bone growth rate and thermometabolism, otherwise impossible to estimate on fossil specimens; for this reason, we used characters measured on long bone histological sections.In the first section, we extensively reviewed the measure of phylogenetic signal for osteohistological features in two clades of vertebrates, which was then used to define the methodology for building our predictive models.After a preliminary study during which we built a predictive model for bone growth rate, we built a global model to predict the metabolic rate of our fossil specimens, using both histological features and phylogenetic information for each specimen. Our results show that a majority of archosaurs in our sample were endotherms. This implies that the last common ancestor of archosaurs was likely an endotherm, and that modern crocodiles became secondarily ectothermic, probably in response to their aquatic environment. More specific studies on pseudosuchians should allow to precisely identify the level of the phylogenetic tree at which the ectothermic state was acquired, as well as adaptive constraints behind this acquisition.