The life history of early reptiles

Modern reptiles, including birds, lizards, and crocodilians, have a wide range of body sizes, which they achieve with notably disparate growth strategies. The evolutionary dynamics that led to these disparate growth strategies are beginning to be understood using charismatic extinct groups like dinosaurs, but a major knowledge gap still prevails in understanding their origins amongst the earliest-branching reptiles. We propose to address this gap through high-resolution synchrotron tomographic histology scans of a broad swathe of stem- and early crown reptiles. The resulting data will be used in the PhD of a South African student and enable us to test hypotheses for the deep-time origins of the modern disparity of reptile growth strategies.