Mamels life animal

I recently realized that you can't really have a milk mustache if you don't have lips. I guess that means we won't be seeing pigeons in any upcoming dairy ad campaigns- even though they make "milk," and it functions like the milk of mammals. by L. Lan Danny “Pigeon milk” was first systematically described in the 1930s and continues to intrigue dairy scientists through today. Pigeon chicks (known as squabs) hatch in a relatively undeveloped state, but during the first days after hatching, they show accelerated development. During this time, female and male pigeons shed “milk” from the epithelial cells in their crop, an enlarged compartment in the gullet in which food is stored prior to digestion. This chunky substance is rich in fats and proteins and is regurgitated to provision the squabs (Davies, 1939). Pigeon “lactation,” as well as parenting behavior, is hormonally regulated by prolactin, as is the case in mammals (reviewed in Horseman and Buntin, 1996).

Milk is everywhere. From the dairy aisle at the grocery store to the explosive cover of the Mother’s Day issue of Time magazine , the ubiquity of milk makes it easy to take for granted. But surprisingly, milk synthesis is evolutionarily older than mammals. Milk is even older than dinosaurs. Moreover, milk contains constituents that infants don’t digest, namely oligosaccharides, which are the preferred diet of the neonate’s intestinal bacteria ( nom nom nom! )  And milk doesn’t just feed the infant, and the infant’s microbiome; the symbiotic bacteria are IN mother’s milk. Evolutionary Origins of Lactation The fossil record, unfortunately, leaves little direct evidence of the soft-tissue structures that first secreted milk. Despite this, paleontologists can scrutinize morphological features of fossils, such as the presence or absence of milk teeth ( diphyodonty ), to infer clues about the emergence of “milk.” Genome-wide surveys of the expression and function of mammary genes across dive