Heater Organs in Marsupials | 20 Jun 2024
Recent research reveals that around 100 million years ago, placental mammals developed brown fat to survive cold and spread worldwide, and this fat evolved only in modern placental mammals.
- Placentals are mammals excluding marsupials and monotremes, and they form one of the three main groups of living mammals, alongside Monotremata and Marsupialia.
- Marsupials are the group of mammals commonly thought of as pouched mammals.
- They give live birth, but they do not have long gestation times like placental mammals.
- They are quite structurally diverse and range from small four-footed forms like the marsupial mole, Notoryctes, to the large two-legged kangaroos.
- Marsupials, which diverged from placental mammals about 120-180 million years ago, possess a less developed form of brown fat.
- Brown fat/Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is an exquisitely designed tissue/organ system that has evolved for the maintenance of body temperature.
- Brown fat's ability to burn fat and sugars to produce heat has implications for treating obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders.
