Predator Style Predicted By Forelimb Bone Data b4in.org/e5CZ Brown University researchers have devised a dataset of forelimb bone measurements that can be used to classify the hunting style of mammalian predators. The now-extinct thylacine (front), shown juxtaposed with its still extant Australian rival the dingo, had forelimb anatomy that was curiously unspecialized for any particular hunting style. Credit: Carl Buell At the start of their research, paleobiologists Christine Janis and Borja Figueirido simply wanted to determine the hunting style of an extinct marsupial called Thylacine (also known as the “marsupial wolf” or the “Tasmanian tiger”). In the end, the Australian relic, which has a very dog-like head but with both cat- and dog-like features in the skeleton, proved to be uniquely unspecialized, but what emerged from the effort is a new classification system that can capably predict the hunting behaviors of mammals from measurements of just a few forelimb bones. “We realized what we are also doing was providing a dataset or a framework whereby people could look at extinct animals because it provides a good categorization of extant forms,” said Janis, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, and co-author of a paper describing the framework in the Journal of Morphology. For example, the scapulas (shoulder blades) of leopards (ambush predators who grapple with rather than chase their prey) and those of cheetahs (pursuit predators who chase their prey over a longer distance) measure very differently. So do their radius (forearm) bones. The shapes of the bones, including areas where muscles attach, place the cheetahs with other animals that evolved for chasing (mainly dogs), and the leopards with others that evolved for grappling (mostly other big cats). “The main differences in the forelimbs really reflect adaptations for strength versus adaptations for speed,” Janis said. In plots of the data in the paper, cheetahs and African hunting dogs appear to be brethren by their scapular proportions even though one is a cat and one is a dog. But the similar scapulas don’t lie: both species are acknowledged by zoologists to be pursuit predators. More b4in.org/e5CZ
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 01:17:32 +0000
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