Postnatal histomorphogenesis of the mandible in the house mouse.

The mandible of the house mouse, Mus musculus, is a model structure for the study of the development and evolution of complex morphological systems. This research describes the histomorphogenesis of the house mouse mandible and analyses its biological significance from the first to the eighth postnatal weeks. Histological data allowed us to test a hypothesis concerning modularity in this structure. We measured the bone growth rates by fluorescent labelling and identified the bone tissue types through microscopic analysis of histological cross-sections of the mandible during its postnatal development. The results provide evidence for a modular structure of the mouse mandible, as the alveolar region and the ascending ramus show histological differences throughout ontogeny. The alveolar region increases in length during the first two postnatal weeks by bone growth in the posterior region, while horizontally positioned incisors preclude bone growth in the anterior region. In the fourth postnatal week, growth dynamics shows a critical change. The alveolar region drifts laterally and the ramus becomes more vertical due to the medial growth direction of the coronoid region and the lateral growth of the ventral region of the ramus. Diet changes after weaning are probably involved in these morphological changes. In this way, the development of the masticatory muscles that insert on the ascending ramus may be particularly related to this shape modeling of the house mouse mandible.

Phylogenetic, functional, and structural components of variation in bone growth rate of amniotes.

The biological features observed in every living organism are the outcome of three sets of factors: historical (inherited by homology), functional (biological adaptation), and structural (properties inherent to the materials with which organs are constructed, and the morphogenetic rules by which they grow). Integrating them should bring satisfactory causal explanations of empirical data. However, little progress has been accomplished in practice toward this goal, because a methodologically efficient tool was lacking. Here we use a new statistical method of variation partitioning to analyze bone growth in amniotes. (1) Historical component. The variation of bone growth rates contains a significant phylogenetic signal, suggesting that the observed patterns are partly the outcome of shared ancestry. (2) Functional causation. High growth rates, although energy costly, may be adaptive (i.e., they may increase survival rates) in taxa showing short growth periods (e.g., birds). In ectothermic amniotes, low resting metabolic rates may limit the maximum possible growth rates. (3) Structural constraint. Whereas soft tissues grow through a multiplicative process, growth of mineralized tissues is accretionary (additive, i.e., mineralization fronts occur only at free surfaces). Bone growth of many amniotes partially circumvents this constraint: it is achieved not only at the external surface of the bone shaft, but also within cavities included in the bone cortex as it grows centrifugally. Our approach contributes to the unification of historicism, functionalism, and structuralism toward a more integrated evolutionary biology.