Party time! Let the media onslaught begin! We’ve published a paper in Nature on the limb motions of Ichthyostega (and by implication, some other stem tetrapods). Since we did use some crocodile specimens from Freezersaurus (see below) in this study, I figured WIJF could cover it to help celebrate this auspicious event. Briefly. Particularly since we already did a quasi-blog on it, which is here:
http://www.rvc.ac.uk/SML/Research/Stories/TetrapodLimbMotion.cfm
and some juicy fossily images at:
http://www.rvc.ac.uk/SML/Research/Stories/TetrapodImages.cfm
However I want to feature our rockin’ cool animations we did for the paper, to squeeze every last possible drop of science communicationy goodness out of them. So here they are in all their digital glory. Huge credit to Dr. Stephanie Pierce, the brilliant, hardworking postdoc who spearheaded the work including these videos! Dr. Jenny Clack is our coauthor on this study and the sage of Ichthyostega and its relatives- her website is here. Also, a big hurrah for our goddess of artsy science, Julia Molnar, who helped with the videos and other images. Enjoy!
The computer model
The forelimb model
The hindlimb model
We used some of my Nile crocodile collection to do a validation analysis of our joint range of motion (ROM) methods, detailed in the Supplementary info of the paper, which I encourage anyone interested to read since it has loads more interesting stuff and cool pics. We found that a bone-based ROM will always give you a greater ROM than an intact fleshy limb-based ROM. In other words, muscles and ligaments (and articular cartilage, etc.). have a net effect of reducing how far a joint can move. This is not shocking but few studies have ever truly quantitatively checked this with empirical data from whole animals. It is an important consideration for all vert paleo types. Here is a pic of one of the crocodiles from the study, with (A) and without muscles (B; ligaments only):
I’ll close with Julia Molnar’s jaw-droppingly awesome flesh reconstruction from our model. Why Nature wouldn’t use this as a cover pic, I’ll never understand, but I LOVE it! When I first saw it enter my email inbox and then opened it to behold its glory, my squeal of geeky joy was deafening.
(edit: Aha! Fellow Berkeley alum Nick Pyenson’s group made the Nature cover, for their kickass study of rorqual whale anatomy, including a “new” organ! Well, we don’t feel so bad then. Great science– and a win for anatomy!!!)
This is just awesomeness squared!
Looks like Ed Yong has covered this over at Not Rocket Science.
Yes, the usual suspects of excellent science bloggers have done nice stories on this: Zimmer, Switek, Yong and others:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/a-new-twist-in-the-tetrapod-tale
and
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/23/virtual-resurrection-shows-that-early-four-legged-animal-couldn%E2%80%99t-walk-very-well/
and
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/05/23/in-the-beginning-was-the-mudskipper/
also:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/05/120523-tetrapod-walk-flopped-nature-science-ichthyostega/
and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18177493
and much more…
I’ve been following this story all day and was really happy to see your post show up in feed reader. I clicked over to the story, and apparently your site is blocked by the filter at work!
What’s really weird is that your work is directly relevant to the work I do with FEA and kinematics software. Is your blog flagged in some way because of the dissection images? It’s not like you’re posing flayed crocodiles with swimsuit models or anything.
Anyway, congratulations on the terrific paper and the huge impact. Off to read what Brian Switek has to say.
Thanks! No idea why the filter would be blocked, although I may have flagged part of the blog as adult or something.
a²+1
This is the stuff that I find fascinating. The bleeding edge of palaeo tetrapod research. This and sauropod necks and speed-walking dinos and pterosaur flight and all the rest of the “how things work” that’s going on at the moment. Yay for modern computers, I say.
Thanks! Computers definitely have been a big part of our ongoing palaeo-renaissance.
‘Squeal of geeky joy’ has entered my vocabulary and auditory memory and has left me smiling all day.
Glad I could contribute to your lexicon! I issue such squeals probably way too often for my own good. 🙂
This is really excellent!!! I casually started reading your blog about a month ago and was so excited to see this! I’m doing similar (though far less ambitious) research, examining current hypotheses about multitiburculate movement using 3D modeling. Out of curiosity, do any blog posts exist about how this model was rigged and in what program? I would be curious to compare notes!
Thanks April! Multituberculates, cool! We haven’t blogged about how the rigging was done, no; I figured most readers would find that too boring. But the Supp Info of the paper does detail it a bit. You could also email Stephanie Pierce for her thoughts on the procedure (spierce at rvc.ac.uk). Happy modelling!
[…] New Year just right, our tetrapod team has a new paper in Nature, following up on last year’s Ichthyostega not-so-good-at-walking study (also see here), but with a more anatomical and “evo-devo” twist to it. For brevity, […]
[…] not only our past and present work with Jenny Clack, Stephanie Pierce, Julia Molnar and others on Ichthyostega & its “fishapod” mates, but also our “scampering salamanders” research in Spain, […]
[…] give due focus to research that the UMZC is doing or has been famous for. Hey I recognize that 3D tetrapod image in the lower left! […]