Previous research has pointed to crocodiles and alligators starting with a land-based ancestor some 200 million years ago and then moving to fresh water, becoming the semi-aquatic ambush predators they are today.

But a new analysis, published online today in the journal Scientific Reports, offers a different story. Modern crocodiles and alligators came from a variety of surroundings beginning in the early Jurassic Period, and various species occupied a host of ecosystems over time, including land, estuarine, freshwater and marine.

As University of Iowa researcher and study co-author Christopher Brochu says, “Crocodiles are not living fossils. Transitions between land, sea, and freshwater were more frequent than we thought, and the transitions were not always land-to-freshwater or freshwater-to-marine.”

Brochu and colleagues from Stony Brook University pieced together crocodile and alligator ancestry by analyzing a large family tree showing the evolutionary history of living and extinct crocodylomorphs (modern crocodiles and alligators and their extinct relatives). The team was then able to predict the ancestral habitat for several divergence points on the evolutionary tree.

This suggests a complex evolutionary history not only of habitat, but of form. Those living at sea had paddles instead of limbs, and those on land often had hoof-like claws and long legs. These did not all evolve from ancestors that looked like modern crocodiles, as has long been assumed.

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The results showed that for a shark to be giant, it would need to first evolve adaptations that enhance feeding such as the ability to control — at least to some degree — their own body temperature or become a filter feeder.

One of the most famous giant sharks, Megalodon — the topic of 2018 Hollywood film The Meg — was an active predator that could measure up to 18 metres in length and became extinct around two million years ago.

Meanwhile, the whale shark — which is still around today — can also reach 18 metres but isn’t an active predator. Instead, it is a filter feeder and eats tiny plankton from the sea.

These two subjects formed key parts of the research, which centred on the tree of life for sharks, where the authors mapped characteristics relating to body size, like their thermo-regulatory capacity, feeding mechanism and diet.

Researchers then found that sharks could become giants by following one of two possible evolutionary pathways; the mesothermic pathway, which consists of evolving the ability to self-control the temperature of their most important organs — or the filter-feeding pathway, which consists of evolving the ability to feed on microscopic plankton.

The mesothermic adaptation allows sharks to live in different types of habitats — including cold waters — and also hunt more effectively. The filter-feeding adaptation allows sharks to eat the most abundant food in the ocean — plankton.

However, there are risks involved for any shark following the evolutionary pathways that lead to gigantism. The mesothermic species need to consume big prey to maintain their high energetic demands, but when these prey are scarce, giant sharks are more susceptible to extinction. The scarcity of large prey in times of rapid climatic change was the most likely cause of the extinction of Megalodon.

While the filter feeders have shown more resilience, they are at risk of eating large volumes of toxic micro plastics that now can be found in the world’s oceans — thus threatening their extinction.

Dr Catalina Pimiento, lead researcher and Postdoctoral fellow at Swansea University, said:

“Sharks provide an ideal case study to understand the evolutionary pathways leading to gigantism in the oceans because they display contrasting lifestyles and adaptations, and because they have an evolutionary history of at least 250 million years.”

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“Stellar winds are the fast-flowing material — composed of protons, electrons, and metal atoms — ejected from stars,” said Pragati Pradhan, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and the lead author of the paper. “This material enriches the star’s surroundings with metals, kinetic energy, and ionizing radiation. It is the source material for star formation. Until the last decade, it was thought that stellar winds were homogenous, but these Chandra data provide direct evidence that stellar winds are populated with dense clumps.”

The neutron star observed is part of a high-mass X-ray binary system — the compact, incredibly dense neutron star paired with a massive ‘normal’ supergiant star. Neutron stars in binary systems produce X-rays when material from the companion star falls toward the neutron star and is accelerated to high velocities. As a result of this acceleration, X-rays are produced that can inturn interact with the materials of the stellar wind to produce secondary X-rays of signature energies at various distances from the neutron star. Neutral — uncharged — iron atoms, for example, produce fluorescence X-rays with energies of 6.4 kilo-electron volts (keV), roughly 3000 times the energy of visible light. Astronomers use spectrometers, like the instrument on Chandra, to capture these X-rays and separate them based on their energy to learn about the compositions of stars.

“Neutral iron atoms are a more common component of stars so we usually see a large peak at 6.4 keV in the data from our spectrometers when looking at X-rays from most neutron stars in a high-mass X-ray binary system,” said Pradhan. “When we looked at X-ray data from the high-mass X-ray binary system known as OAO 1657-415 we saw that this peak at 6.4 keV had an unusual feature. The peak had a broad extension down to 6.3 keV. This extension is referred to as a ‘Compton shoulder’ and indicates that the X-rays from neutral iron are being back scattered by dense matter surrounding the star. This is only the second high-mass X-ray binary system where such a feature has been detected.”

The researchers also used the Chandra’s state-of-the-art engineering to identify a lower limit on the distance from the neutron star that the X-rays from neutral iron are formed. Their spectral analysis showed that neutral iron is ionized at least 2.5 light-seconds, a distance of approximately 750 million meters or nearly 500,000 miles, from the neutron star to produce X-rays.

“In this work, we see a dimming of the X-rays from the neutron star and a prominent line from neutral iron in the X-ray spectrum — two signatures supporting the clumpy nature of stellar winds,” said Pradhan. “Furthermore, the detection of Compton shoulder has also allowed us to map the environment around this neutron star. We expect to be able to improve our understanding of these phenomenon with the upcoming launch of spacecrafts like Lynx and Athena, which will have improved X-ray spectral resolution.”

For Pradhan’s post-doctoral work at Penn State under the supervision of Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics David Burrows, Associate Research Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Jamie Kennea, and Research Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Abe Falcone, she is majorly involved in writing algorithms for on-board detection of X-rays from transient astronomical events such as those seen from these high-mass X-ray binary systems for instruments that will be on the Athena spacecraft.

Pradhan and her team also have a follow-up campaign looking at the same high-mass X-ray binary with another NASA satellite — NuSTAR, which will cover a broader spectrum of X-rays from this source ranging in energies from ~ 3 to 70 keV — in May 2019.

“We are excited about the upcoming NuSTAR observation too,” said Pradhan. “Such observations in hard X-rays will add another dimension to our understanding of the physics of this system and we will have an opportunity to estimate the magnetic field of the neutron star in OAO 1657-415, which is likely a million times stronger than strongest magnetic field on Earth.”

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