Re: Why all apes including humans do not have tails

On 09/03/2024 18:45, erik simpson wrote:

On 3/9/24 7:16 AM, jillery wrote:

On Wed, 28 Feb 2024 17:21:19 -0600, RonO <rokimoto@cox.net> wrote:
>

It turns out that the common ancestor that between gibbons and the great
apes had an ALU transposon jump into the intron between exon 6 and exon
7 of the TBXT gene.  There was already an transposon between exon 5 and
exon 6.  Monkeys and apes have the ALU insertion in the intron between
exon 5 and exon 6, but the apes have the second ALU insertion in the
intron between exons 6 and 7.  So it turns out that apes still have the
exon 6 sequence in the TBXT gene, but the two ALU transposon sequences
form a stem loop structure in the RNA transcript that messes up
processing so exon 6 is skipped and exon 5 is stuck to exon 7 in the
final ape mRNA.  So part of what makes us human is due to a transposon
insertion mutation into the TBXT gene.
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The insertion happened in the common ancestor of all extant apes, and
has been retained by the extant ape lineages.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07095-8
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The article is open access.
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Ron Okimoto

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>
In the following Youtube video, Gutsick Gibbon provides a 33-minute
anthropological perspective about the same article:
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<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dImLB0ePWR8>
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It turns out that losing their tails had happened to at least one
other primate group, between lorises and bushbabies.  It would be
interesting to see if the tailless lorises have a similar ALU
transposon in the TBXT gene.
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>

It seems that the Lorax also is tailless.  I doubt it has anything to do
with ALU.
 

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Isn't the Lorax an ape though? Even a hominid, as it has hands AND feet
- but I suppose the latter might be the kind of trait that could evolve
convergently in any ape group that becomes ground-based & bipedal.