Why do apes have no tails?

The existence of transposable factors may explain how humans and our close relatives of great apes lost their tails 25 million years ago

The mutation was discovered by Xia Bo, a graduate student at New York University's Langone School of Medicine.

However, it was not until Xia and colleagues compared the TBXT sequence of the tailless apes with the TBXT sequences of other tailed primates that this gene was clearly linked to the lack of tails in apes

Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, said: "I wouldn't suddenly realize that this is an obvious mutation that needs to be tested

According to a report in "Science" magazine, Alu appears to be working in conjunction with another Alu that has previously added the gene

Both humans and apes can produce longer and shorter transcripts, but mice produce only longer transcripts

Although this discovery reveals how apes lose their tails, why they lose their tails is another question entirely

In addition, the research team found that many of the mice with genetically altered TBXT had neural tube problems, similar to the type of birth defects that caused spina bifida or anencephaly, although Hoekstra pointed out that it is not clear what the mice and humans are.

"Obviously, we paid the price for losing the tail, and we can still feel the echo," said Masaru Yanai, the lead author of the study and a geneticist at New York University Langone’s health developmental geneticist.