Comments and corrections on 3D modeling studies of locomotor muscle moment arms in archosaurs
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Author and article information
Abstract
In a number of recent studies we used computer modeling to investigate the evolution of muscle leverage (moment arms) and function in extant and extinct archosaur lineages (crocodilians, dinosaurs including birds and pterosaurs). These studies sought to quantify the level of disparity and convergence in muscle moment arms during the evolution of bipedal and quadrupedal posture in various independent archosaur lineages, and in doing so further our understanding of changes in anatomy, locomotion and ecology during the group’s >250 million year evolutionary history. Subsequent work by others has led us to re-evaluate our models, which revealed a methodological error that impacted on the results obtained from the abduction-adduction and long-axis rotation moment arms in our published studies. In this paper we present corrected abduction-adduction and long axis rotation moment arms for all our models, and evaluate the impact of this new data on the conclusions of our previous studies. We find that, in general, our newly corrected data differed only slightly from that previously published, with very few qualitative changes in muscle moments (e.g. muscles originally identified as abductors remained abductors). As a result the majority of our previous conclusions regarding the functional evolution of key muscles in these archosaur groups are upheld.
Cite this as
2015. Comments and corrections on 3D modeling studies of locomotor muscle moment arms in archosaurs. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1151v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1151v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
Herein we presented corrected data on hind limb muscle moments from a range of living and extinct archosaurs that we have studied previously. Reanalysis of this corrected data from four previously published studies shows few substantive differences from our previously published results, although several reinterpretations of specific muscle functions have resulted. Nevertheless, these minor amendments do not undermine our earlier conclusions regarding the function and evolution of these locomotor systems and in some cases provide additional support for our previous interpretations. Our corrected data is available in the supplementary material for use in future studies on these interesting taxa.
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Supplemental Information
Supplementary Data
Corrected abduction-adduction and long axis rotation moment arm data
Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Karl Bates conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Susannah C.R. Maidment conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Emma R. Schachner conceived and designed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Paul M Barrett conceived and designed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work.
