Come Participate in Ending the Silence on Mental Health in Biological Anthropology This Thursday

As discussed by Angela Mallard's March 13th post, a special American Association of Physical Anthropologists luncheon panel discussion will be held this Thursday, the 20th of April, from 12:30 to 2:00 P.M. in room Riverview 1 of the New Orleans Marriott. We hope that you will be able to attend what promises to be the start of a timely and important conversation!

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Monkey See, Monkey Do? Deciphering the Structure-Function Relationship in the Fossil Record

An organism’s survival is contingent on the way it moves and interacts with the environment. We can get at the relationship between a living organism’s morphology and the way it moves through direct observation and experimentation. This relationship, however, is more clandestine in fossil organisms. In our last blog post, Ben touched on the use of comparative anatomy to infer the structure-function relationship in the fossil record. In this post, I briefly explore this topic from a historical perspective and discuss its potential for evolutionary analysis. 

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Dynamic Duos: Why Examining More Bones is (Mechanically) Better Than One

A common question raised in research by morphologists and functional anatomists is, “How do we better understand the movement of this creature?” From the work of earliest naturalists, descriptions of the shape and size of bones were key aspects to this research endeavor. Further, because of the fragmentary nature of the fossils of many ancient organisms, scientists learned to draw conclusions from isolated or a few skeletal elements. Perhaps because of decades of using this approach, we have grown accustomed to examining certain single bones over others, even when we have completely intact skeletons to consider. Yet, examining one element may be ignoring subtle but important contributions that better explain variation in the morphology of multiple bones.

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