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The presence of a transposable element might explain how humans and our great ape cousins lost our tails about 25 million years ago.
The mutation, discovered by NYU Langone Health graduate student Bo Xia, is in a gene called TBXT, which codes for a transcription factor involved in embryonic development—although, according to The New York Times, this wasn’t the first time TBXT has been implicated in mammalian tail morphology. As far back as 1923, Russian geneticist Nadezhda Dobrovolskaya-Zavadskaya exposed male mice to X-rays and then observed their progeny after they bred. She saw that some of their offspring developed shortened or kinked tails, and later experiments showed that these mice had TBXT mutations.
Still, this gene hadn’t specifically been linked to the lack of tails in apes until Xia and colleagues compared the sequences of TBXT from tailless apes to those of other primates with tails, ...
