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.
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!
Members of the Ross Lab and collaborators have published a new paper in Journal of Experimental Biology. The paper describes using opossum mandible models to compare with in vivo data and calculate load paths, highlighting this method as a way to understand form-function relationships in the skeleton.
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.
Dr. Ross is a coauthor on Dr. Andrea Taylor’s new paper on muscle fiber measurement techniques in strepsirrhine and platyrrhine primates. Evidence from this paper suggests that different techniques produce different results, and therefore the purpose of the study should be considered when considering which technique to use.
