Labyrinth in a seal's nose

Many mammals have an elaborated bone in their nose called maxilloturbinate that helps the animal to preserve heat and moisture during breathing. The seals that live in cold waters pushed this structure to the extreme, creating beautifully tree and maze like patterns that have a lot of fine details. How do they do it? In this new collaborative work by Kings et al., we explored an algorithmic morphogenetic model that recapitulates key aspects of the pattern, and discussed possible developmental mechanisms underlying them. Read more at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.15.571824v1