Mustache - vibrisy promoted the evolution of mammals, defining their superiority over reptiles. To such conclusion scientists from the University of Sheffield (UK), studied the movement of whiskers in rodents and marsupials.
Whiskers, or, more precisely, the whiskers - is mechanosensitive hairs, which in mammals can be located throughout the body, but are usually grouped in the face. In some animals they are long, others - are short, and some have none at all. They perform a tactile function, and feel can not only hard surfaces, but also, for example, fluctuations in air.
According to compulenta. ru, zoologists have high speed recording whisker motion in mice and rats. Everyone saw how the vibrissae in rodents: their tiny heartbeats, even impossible to distinguish. For these animals, a mustache, perhaps, important as for anyone else, with their help, they actually build a map of the area, determining the shape and texture of the surrounding objects and instantly deciding how to treat them and what to do with them. Vibrissae work scholars have thoroughly mathematical analysis, determining the spatial and temporal parameters of the vibrational motions.
But the essence of the study was different: after the rodents, scientists have analyzed the vibration of whiskers as a possum brownie.
This South American marsupial animal is believed, bears many features of a distant ancestor of all mammals, unprepossessing, who lived under the feet of the giant reptiles, more than 125 million. years ago. Rodents and marsupials are very distantly related, but despite this, the mechanics of vibrissa movement in those and other proved to be more similar than. For example, if you move forward with a mustache on both sides of the head move the same, but when you turn predispose the animals to one side and their whiskers, so that one side of the head are grouped a mustache for a meeting with a possible target, but on the other - as if rastopyrivayutsya, covering more space. Changing the trajectory requires more information as reflected in changes in the mechanics of whiskers.
At the same time much more important is the fact that even in primitive opossum whiskers work as well as his more evolutionary advanced family of rodents. The authors suggest that a mustache was one of those devices (along with a live birth, warm-blooded, an increase in brain and other things) that have provided an evolutionary success of mammals. The first animals were small nocturnal animals, to survive, they needed improved system of orientation in space. Whiskers have been a great addition to smell, hearing and vision, and all together has allowed mammals are equally sure to feel like night and day, unlike reptiles.
Over time, whiskers, following the historic role, in many species have lost their meaning and faded away.
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