 Non-fibrillar collagen is the major supporting component of the extracellular matrix.The morphology of fibrillar and non-fibrillar collagen types became differentiated during divergent evolution.These two collagen types arose from different mutation and gene duplication events that evolved to the current 28 types of collagen proteins providing the diversification of collagen-supporting structures in the body, such as the skeleton, which formed from the alpha (denoted as α) collagen gene.