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.

Emily McParland, Dr. Ross, and colleagues publish a new paper on rat chewing kinematics

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Emily McParland, Dr. Ross and colleagues, including lab alumni JD Laurence-Chasen and Kazutaka Takahashi, have published a new paper on the kinematics of chewing in the Wistar brown rat (Rattus norvegicus). This paper arose out of the fruitful collaboration between Dr. Ross’s lab at the University of Chicago and Dr. Nicholas Gidmark’s lab at Knox College. Because this species has an unfused mandibular symphysis, the kinematics are quite complex. The paper finds that due to the complexity, the rat is an unsuitable species in many cases for studying general mammalian chewing evolution or human chewing.