As a versatile joint, the wrist remains stable through large motions under a variety of loading conditions. Wrist motion is achieved through the individual articulations …
Animals of all kinds use gesture, or body movement, to communicate. Despite its ubiquity, this signaling mechanism is little studied on a functional or evolutionary …
In fish, the task of eating in an aquatic medium has resulted in a diversity of complex feeding mechanisms. My dissertation work investigated a selection …
From quadrupedal alligators and dinosaurs to flying pterosaurs and birds, archosaurs are a fascinating group of reptiles that exhibit a diverse locomotor repertoire at the …
Unlike birds and insects, bats fly using compliant and slender membrane wings. Membrane wings offer negligible bending stiffness, and thus when they experience aerodynamic load, …
Abstract of Food, Fear, and Femurs: Resource Use and Functional Diversity in Mammals by Courtney G. Reed, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2023. Fear and hunger …
Theropod dinosaurs offer an excellent opportunity for the study of the evolution of locomotion. Since theropods are the other major group of striding bipeds besides …
This thesis explores the kinematic (motion) interaction between foot and ground in archosaurs (birds, crocodiles, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs). The function and morphology (shape) of the …
Slithering, sprinting, swimming, soaring – virtually all vertebrate animal motion relies on the joints that hold our skeletons together. However, despite orthopedists’ ability to repair …
The environments in which animals live are complex and disruptive. These qualities contrast with the steady, smooth, and stereotyped movements that comprise foundational studies in …
An elongate ‘snake-like’ body form has evolved more than 65 times within vertebrates and is present within almost every major clade. Of the disparate taxa …
The vertebral column of fishes is thought to impact locomotion by contributing to body stiffness while allowing flexibility in bending. Thus, variation in vertebral and …
Many fishes use their ‘swimming’ muscles to generate most of the power for suction feeding, an explosive behavior whereby fish ingest food by sucking water …
Cyprinidae, the largest freshwater fish family, is taxonomically, morphologically, and trophically diverse. Piscivory, detritivory, insectivory, molluscivory and herbivory are all niches occupied by one more …
Fossilized tracks provide the only direct records of the locomotion of extinct taxa. As such, fossil hominin footprints have the potential to provide insight into …
Flying organisms are capable of a wide variety of flight behaviors, including flying at a range of speeds, maneuvering to catch prey, carrying weight, hovering, …
This dissertation focuses on the functional morphology of the tongue in a nectar-feeding bat, Glossophaga soricina. To date, the tissue architecture of the tongue, the …
The plagiopatagiales proprii are an array of muscles hypothesized to modulate stiffness of the armwing membrane and prevent excessive billowing during flight in bats. Electromyographic …
A central focus of genetics seeks to understand how genotype contributes to phenotype. Simple, single gene traits are generally driven by alleles with additive or …
Abstract of Thermal Sensitivity of Bat Wing Muscles, by Andrea Rummel, Ph.D., Brown University, October 2021 Temperature has a pervasive, unavoidable effect on biological systems, …