Everyone of us started life from one single cell formed by the fusion of an egg and a sperm. That single cell gave rise to every structure in our bodies. How did that happen? Salamanders especially the axolotl are known to be able to regenerate limbs while frogs and lizards cannot. How and why?
The Dutch filmmaker Jan van IJken did a superb job bringing a fresh new artistic look into the fascinating process of vertebrate embryo development. The original technique for recording development of salamander embryos were developed by Yale University researchers in the 1920s. The time lapsed footage of salamander embryos developing from single fertilized eggs forms the basis of our morphological understanding of animal development. These recordings have been among the best of scientific visualizations. Studies like this have been foundational for developmental biology and have lead to the stem cell technology that is flourishing in our time.
Since then we have accumulated a large body of knowledge that can be summarized under the phrase “Evo Devo” which is now a busy field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer the ancestral relationships among them. The Cambrian explosion were most probably was due to duplications in Homebox genes which played an immensely critical role in evolution of body plans across animal kingdom. Thanks to the salamander we can investigate tetrapod biology in great detail using genetics.
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