New Ross Lab paper in Evolutionary Anthropology!

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We’re excited to congratulate Dr. Yeganeh Sekhavati, Ross Lab alum Dr. Kaleb Sellers, and Dr. Ross on their new paper, “Biomechanics and Evolution of the Primate Tongue”, published this week in Evolutionary Anthropology! This paper explores the primate tongue as a muscular hydrostat with regionally specialized neuromuscular compartments, using anatomical, kinematic, and biomechanical modeling to understand how muscle structure and fiber orientation control complex tongue movements during feeding and vocalization. It also compares species-specific adaptations in macaques and humans, synthesizes recent advances in modeling and experimental studies, and highlights the role of three-dimensional analyses in understanding tongue function across different behavioral contexts.

New paper out of the Ross and Zhe-Xi Luo labs!

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Congratulations to Alec Wilken and Chelsie Snipes for publishing their new paper, “Biomechanics of the mandibular middle ear of the cynodont Thrinaxodon and the evolution of mammal hearing”, along with Dr. Ross and frequent collaborator Zhe-Xi Luo! This paper uses finite element analysis to show that the 250-million-year-old synapsid Thrinaxodon already possessed tympanic hearing similar to modern mammals, relying primarily on a soft-tissue eardrum for airborne sound detection. The results indicate that the functional shift toward a mammalian middle ear—detached from the jaw and specialized for sensitive hearing—occurred very early in mammalian evolutionary history. This paper was covered in UChicago’s Biological Sciences Division newsletter- see the coverage here!

Peishu Li, Ross Lab, and collaborators publish tongue base retraction paper

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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.