2025 - Peishu Li, Ross Lab, and collaborators publish tongue base retraction paper
Congratulations to Dr. Peishu Li and his collaborators within and outside the Ross Lab (including two undergraduate students and one high schooler working with the lab) for publishing a new paper in Integrative and Comparative Biology. The paper compares and contrasts mechanisms of tongue base retraction in macaques, opossums, and dogs to investigate hypotheses of their evolutionary conservation, concluding that the the biomechanics of TBR are functionally diverse and not strictly determined by anatomical variation, allowing for evolutionary flexibility in hyolingual morphology without compromising swallowing performance.
2025 - Dr. Yeganeh Sekhavati publishes new hominin foot paper
Congratulations to Ross Lab postdoc, Yeganeh Sekhavati, for publishing a new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution! The paper examines the evolution of foot morphology in hominins, focusing on changes essential for bipedalism. Dr. Sekhavati and colleagues analyzed 62 foot-related traits and reconstructed ancestral characteristics to trace foot evolution from the last common ancestor of Homo and Pan. The results suggest a Pan-like ancestor, with early adaptations for foot eversion and midtarsal stability preceding other stability features. Additionally, arboreal traits were found in the Paranthropus and Australopithecus clades, indicating evolutionary adaptations from an African ape-like ancestor.
2025 - Dr. Ross publishes 2 new papers with lab collaborators
Dr. Ross has published 2 new papers in April. The first, coauthored with lab alum Dr. Amanda Smith, along with many other collaborators, finds that Homo habilis, while exhibiting australopith-like facial strain during biting, was not adapted for forceful molar processing, suggesting that dietary or food processing changes were significant in the emergence of Homo. The second, with Ross Lab alum Dr. Katie Whitlow and UChicago researcher Dr. Mark Westneat, finds that that bowfin, similar to teleost fishes, adapt their jaw movements, hyoid arch depression, and pectoral girdle motions based on prey type and suggests that the ability to modulate feeding strikes evolved early in actinopterygian fishes and may be an ancestral trait for jawed vertebrates.
2025 - Alec Wilken, Kaleb Sellers, and colleagues publish a new paper!
Congrats to Alec Wilken and Kaleb Sellers on their new publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! The paper uses 3D muscle modeling and linkage analysis to shed light on the origin of powered cranial kinesis in avian dinosaurs.
2024 - Congratulations, Peishu Li, PhD!
We are excited to announce Dr. Peishu Li's successful defense of his PhD dissertation, titled Evolutionary Morphology of the Mammalian Hyoid Apparatus: Form, Function and Diversity. We wish him luck in his new position as faculty at Ohio University!
