Dragons may sleep like Mammals and Birds

[Techno-Druid]

Lizards might snooze like humans do.

Sleeping lizards appear to share distinctive brain activity patterns with sleeping birds and mammals, researchers report in the April 29 Science. If true, the results suggest that human sleep patterns evolved by around 300 million years ago in a common ancestor of birds, mammals and reptiles.

During sleep, mammal and bird brains alternate between two states of activity. In deep, slow-wave sleep, recordings of the brain’s electrical activity show sparse bursts of big, slow waves. During rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, brain waves appear small and fast, like those of an awake brain. REM sleep is usually accompanied by quickly twitching eyes.

“The prevailing view has been that REM and slow-wave sleep are limited to mammals and birds,” says study coauthor Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. Many researchers think that birds and mammals separately evolved this similar sleep pattern, Laurent says. So when he and his colleagues monitored dozing Australian dragons (Pogona vitticeps), they were surprised to find familiar patterns.

“We saw this two-state sleep in the lizard, which we definitely did not expect,” says study coauthor Mark Shein-Idelson, also of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.

While exhibiting REM-like brain waves, the dragons’ eyes flicked, a convincing sign that lizards sleep like mammals, Shein-Idelson says. Probes implanted in the dragons’ brains revealed hundreds of cycles of alternating slow-wave–like and REM-like sleep each night. Lizards’ sleep cycles were simple and speedy, though — each around 80 seconds on average, compared with roughly a half hour in cats and up to an hour and a half in humans, Laurent says.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...mals-and-birds

Very interesting, to think that lizards and as an extension reptiles shared even more similarities with birds and mammals is astounding in my opinion.

[TrumpIsPresident]

Well now I want one of these as a pet...

[Techno-Druid]

Well now I want one of these as a pet...

Yeah, it's the perfect mix of weird and adorable.

[Powerogue]

Huh, I expected something more majestic.



Yeah, that's basically how I sleep.

[Reeve]

Well now I want one of these as a pet...

Beautiful, but ultimately kinda boring.

[Deleted]

Sleeping dragon.

[Sunseeker]

Alternatively, what the brain does at night evolved independently as a biological necessity. It's a stretch to make similar brain functions mean shared ancestry.

[Techno-Druid]

Alternatively, what the brain does at night evolved independently as a biological necessity. It's a stretch to make similar brain functions mean shared ancestry.

Well hell, we definitely have shared ancestry if you go really far back.

But this isn't neccessarily trying to prove that reptiles are closely related to birds and mammals, rather that this reptile branch has evolved something that many thought only mammals and birds possessed.

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By the way let me say that Sleeping Dragon sounds sort of like a sauce you would get from a Pan-Asian food resturant.

[mykro9]

By the way let me say that Sleeping Dragon sounds sort of like a sauce you would get from a Pan-Asian food resturant.

Yep, and ghost peppers provide the kick.

Sleeping Dragon could also be a sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as well.

[Danuru]

Can you learn something if you always assumed something that was thought to be wrong but was later proven correct, but the only reason you assumed it was because you simply knew nothing about it?