Dataset Information

Interspecific variation in the limb long bones among modern rhinoceroses-extent and drivers.

ABSTRACT: Among amniotes, numerous lineages are subject to an evolutionary trend toward body mass and size increases. Large terrestrial species may face important constraints linked to weight bearing, and the limb segments are particularly affected by such constraints due to their role in body support and locomotion. Such groups showing important limb modifications related to high body mass have been called "graviportal." Often considered graviportal, rhinoceroses are among the heaviest terrestrial mammals and are thus of particular interest to understand the limb modifications related to body mass and size increase. Here, we present a morphofunctional study of the shape variation of the limb long bones among the five living rhinos to understand how the shape may vary between these species in relation with body size, body mass and phylogeny. We used three dimensional geometric morphometrics and comparative analyses to quantify the shape variation. Our results indicate that the five species display important morphological differences depending on the considered bones. The humerus and the femur exhibit noticeable interspecific differences between African and Asiatic rhinos, associated with a significant effect of body mass. The radius and ulna are more strongly correlated with body mass. While the tibia exhibits shape variation both linked with phylogeny and body mass, the fibula displays the greatest intraspecific variation. We highlight three distinct morphotypes of bone shape, which appear in accordance with the phylogeny. The influence of body mass also appears unequally expressed on the different bones. Body mass increase among the five extant species is marked by an increase of the general robustness, more pronounced attachments for muscles and a development of medial parts of the bones. Our study underlines that the morphological features linked to body mass increase are not similar between rhinos and other heavy mammals such as elephants and hippos, suggesting that the weight bearing constraint can lead to different morphological responses.

SUBMITTER: Mallet C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6766374 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Interspecific variation in the limb long bones among modern rhinoceroses-extent and drivers.

Mallet Christophe C Cornette Raphaël R Billet Guillaume G Houssaye Alexandra A

PeerJ 20190926

Among amniotes, numerous lineages are subject to an evolutionary trend toward body mass and size increases. Large terrestrial species may face important constraints linked to weight bearing, and the limb segments are particularly affected by such constraints due to their role in body support and locomotion. Such groups showing important limb modifications related to high body mass have been called "graviportal." Often considered graviportal, rhinoceroses are among the heaviest terrestrial mammal ...[more]

PMID: 31579585

Similar Datasets

Project description:Plants exhibit a diverse set of functional traits and ecological strategies which reflect an adaptation process to the biotic and abiotic components of the environment. The Plant Economic Spectrum organizes these traits along a continuum from conservative to acquisitive resource use strategies and shows how the abiotic environment governs a species' position along the continuum. However, this framework does not typically account for leaf traits associated with herbivore resistance, despite fundamental metabolic links (and therefore co-variance) between resource use traits and defensive traits. Here we analyzed a suite of leaf traits associated with either resource use (specific leaf area [SLA], nutrients and water content) or defenses (phenolic compounds) for saplings of 11 species of oaks (Quercus spp.), and further investigated whether climatic variables underlie patterns of trait interspecific variation. An ordination of leaf traits revealed the primary axis of trait variation to be leaf economic spectrum traits associated with resource use (SLA, nitrogen, water content) in conjunction with a defensive trait (condensed tannins). Secondary and tertiary axes of trait variation were mainly associated with other defensive traits (lignins, flavonoids, and hydrolysable tannins). Within the primary axis we found a trade-off between resource use traits and both water content and condensed tannins; species with high SLA and leaf N values invested less in condensed tannins and viceversa. Moreover, temperature and precipitation mediated the trait space occupied by species, such that species distributed in warmer and drier climates had less leaf N, lower SLA, and more defenses (condensed tannins, lignins and flavonoids), whereas opposite values were observed for species distributed in colder and wetter climates. These results emphasize the role of abiotic controls over all-inclusive axes of trait variation and contribute to a more complete understanding of interspecific variation in plant functional strategies.

Project description:BackgroundBone shapes strongly influence force and moment predictions of kinematic and musculoskeletal models used in motion analysis. The precise determination of joint reference frames is essential for accurate predictions. Since clinical motion analysis typically does not include medical imaging, from which bone shapes may be obtained, scaling methods using reference subjects to create subject-specific bone geometries are widely used.Research questionThis study investigated if lower limb bone shape predictions from skin-based measurements, utilising an underlying statistical shape model (SSM) that corrects for soft tissue artefacts in digitisation, can be used to improve conventional linear scaling methods of bone geometries.MethodsSSMs created from 35 healthy adult femurs and tibiae/fibulae were used to reconstruct bone shapes by minimising the distance between anatomical landmarks on the models and those digitised in the motion laboratory or on medical images. Soft tissue artefacts were quantified from magnetic resonance images and then used to predict distances between landmarks digitised on the skin surface and bone. Reconstruction results were compared to linearly scaled models by measuring root mean squared distances to segmented surfaces, calculating differences of commonly used anatomical measures and the errors in the prediction of the hip joint centre.ResultsSSM reconstructed surface predictions from varying landmark sets from skin and bone landmarks were more accurate compared to linear scaling methods (2.60-2.95 mm vs. 3.66-3.87 mm median error; p < 0.05). No significant differences were found between SSM reconstructions from bony landmarks and SSM reconstructions from digitised landmarks obtained in the motion lab and therefore reconstructions using skin landmarks are as accurate as reconstructions from landmarks obtained from medical images.SignificanceThese results indicate that SSM reconstructions can be used to increase the accuracy in obtaining bone shapes from surface digitised experimental data acquired in motion lab environments.

Dataset Information

Interspecific variation in the limb long bones among modern rhinoceroses-extent and drivers.

Publications

Interspecific variation in the limb long bones among modern rhinoceroses-extent and drivers.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets