Scientists have found new information while conducting research on the lifespan of human beings. They have claimed that humans could have lived for 200 years, but dinosaurs did not let this happen!
A team led by Microbiologist Joao Pedro de Magalhaes from the University of Birmingham has carried out a study on this matter. They stressed on an evident difference between how quickly mammals, like humans, age and how the ageing takes place in reptiles and amphibians. Researchers initially observed that mammals age faster than reptiles. Joao also studied how reptiles reach adulthood. He has found that dinosaurs are one of the reasons for the difference in lifespan between reptiles and mammals! This discrepancy is likely because the dinosaurs dominated this planet millions of years ago, especially at an important time period in mammalian history.
Joao has mentioned in his research paper, titled 'Longevity Bottleneck', that smaller mammals needed to reproduce faster for their survival when the dinosaurs were roaming on the Earth! According to the microbiologist, mammals were forced to discard many genes for the sake of rapid reproduction and fast evolution. He has further claimed that the dinosaurs pushed a number of mammals to the bottom of the food chain. In other words, they became the food of almost all living creatures at that time! That is why mammals went through an evolution for about 100 million years. During this period, they made a desperate attempt to protect themselves from the dinosaurs by breeding fast.
Joao believes that the process of rapid reproduction had a negative impact on the lifespan of mammals. It also had an effect on the way human beings got matured and aged. Research has shown that the ancestors of mammals had lost several enzymes in the Mesozoic Era (between about 245 and 66 million years ago). It may be noted that scientists have divided the Mesozoic Era into three periods: the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. This was many millions of years before the first modern humans, Homo Sapiens, appeared. This symptom (loss of enzymes) was especially observed in Eutherian mammals. They became somewhat mature even before their birth. At that period of time, mammals had some enzymes to repair their skin damage caused by Ultra-Violet (UV) rays emitted by the Sun. Unfortunately, mammals lost that enzyme during their evolution.
Science Alert has quoted Joao as saying: "Some of the earliest mammals were forced to live towards the bottom of the food chain, and have likely spent 100 million years during the age of the dinosaurs evolving to survive through rapid reproduction." He added: "That long period of evolutionary pressure has, I propose, an impact on the way that we humans age." The microbiologist stressed: "We see examples in the animal world of truly remarkable repair and regeneration. That genetic information would have been unnecessary for early mammals that were lucky to not end up as T. rex food."
Meanwhile, Joao and his team have not yet found any evidence that mammals lost some enzymes due to the shortening of their lifespan. They are of the opinion that mammals lost a lot over the billions of years, apart from enzymes that used to protect them from UV rays. They have hinted that the mammal, who tried to become nocturnal to stay safe, might have faced more losses, and now these losses are being covered with the use of sun cream after millions of years.
Joao also believes that mammals' tendency to develop and age faster than other animals might have made them more prone to cancer. However, this is just a possibility, as the microbiologist could not be sure about it yet. He stated: "While just a hypothesis at the moment, there are lots of intriguing angles to take this, including the prospect that cancer is more frequent in mammals than other species due to the rapid ageing process."
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