Project description
This project will literally ask the question "why the long face" by trying to determine why larger mammals tend to have longer snouts than smaller relatives. Our Bones & Biodiversity lab thinks it is because larger mammals have bigger skulls and bigger muscles, and can therefore “afford” to have longer faces and still chomp through the same food as their smaller relatives. This also means that animals with different diets to their closest relatives should be an exception to this rule. You can read about the details in this article or watch collaborator Rex Mitchell's YouTube video. We’re pretty sure that this works: for example, hyaenas have much shorter faces than their flesh-eating, similarly sized big cat relatives. But we need YOUR HELP to properly test this! For this project, you will collect 3D meshes of skulls from differently-sized representatives of a mammalian group with well-known diets. We recommend kangaroos, dasyurids, bovids, or carnivoran families like canids, but are open to other suggestions. You will then use 3D landmarking and our existing geometric morphometrics code to test if changes in diet are connected with changes in skull shape - longer if diets are softer, and shorter if diets are harder.
Co-supervisors
Dr Rex Mitchell of Skullywag Lab fame
Assumed knowledge
Nothing you haven't learned in undergrad :-). An interest in coding and 3D imaging would be great, too.
Note: You need to register interest in projects from different supervisors (not a number of projects with the one supervisor).
You must also contact each supervisor directly to discuss both the project details and your suitability to undertake the project.