Prenatal Brain-Body Allometry in Mammals

Abstract

Variation in relative brain size among adult mammals is produced by different patterns of brain and body growth across ontogeny. Fetal development plays a central role in generating this diversity, and aspects of prenatal physiology such as maternal relative metabolic rate, altriciality, and placental morphology have been proposed to explain allometric differences in neonates and adults. Primates are also uniquely encephalized across fetal development, but it remains unclear when this pattern emerges during development and whether it is common to all primate radiations. To reexamine these questions across a wider range of mammalian radiations, data on the primarily fetal rapid growth phase (RGP) of ontogenetic brain-body allometry was compiled for diverse primate (np = 12) and nonprimate (nnp = 16) mammalian species, and was complemented by later ontogenetic data in 16 additional species (np = 9; nnp = 7) as well as neonatal proportions in a much larger sample (np = 38; nnp = 83). Relative BMR, litter size, altriciality, and placental morphology fail to predict RGP slopes as would be expected if physiological and life history variables constrained fetal brain growth, but are associated with differences in birth timing along allometric trajectories. Prenatal encephalization is shared by all primate radiations, is unique to the primate Order, and is characterized by: (1) a robust change in early embryonic brain/body proportions, and (2) higher average RGP allometric slopes due to slower fetal body growth. While high slopes are observed in several nonprimate species, primates alone exhibit an intercept shift at 1 g body size. This suggests that primate prenatal encephalization is a consequence of early changes to embryonic neural and somatic tissue growth in primates that remain poorly understood.