What’s in an Age? [Guest post from Dr. Alice Gooding, Kennesaw State University]

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Are we really doomed to mechanical and material breakdowns in our skeletons shortly after we reach adulthood? It is true that bone loss with age in humans is nearly universal. It has been documented worldwide in both living and past populations, as well as non-human primates. And though bone loss may begin after bones fuse, it accelerates during mid-life (after age 40) and continues after mid-life in humans. Increased bone loss is concurrent with an increased risk of fracture, decreased mobility, and even in industrialized societies, increased mortality. Why do humans live long past the years when bone loss begins?

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

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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

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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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