COMPUTATIONAL BIOMECHANICS OF THE CHEWING MECHANISM IN MAMMALS
Diet is one of the main factors underlying the behavioural and ecological differences among living mammals and the mammalian mandible plays a fundamental role in food processing, as it transmits the forces generated by masticatory muscles to the food through the teeth. Computational methods from biomechanics such as Finite Element Analysis (FEA) have also recently been applied to a wide diversity of vertebrates, providing new insights into function of structures related to ingesta. I focalized in using comparative methods among mammal species in order to understand their chewing mechanism using all the new theoretical approaches described here. Thanks to this methods, I associated results from biomechanics and morphology to the classification of dietary preferences in mammals, as well as the inference of dietary habits of extinct fossils.
Comparative methods and new developed ideas have been applied in studying several biomechanical models of primate jaws to study its implication with diet in Püschel et al. (2018) or in Marcé-Nogué et al. (2017, 2020) where, for the first time, more than 30 biomechanical models of actual primates using FEA were studied with significant results when comparing diet. The dietary preferences through biomechanicals models using FEA was also studied with success in armadillos in Serrano-Fochs et al. (2015), Marcé-Nogué et al. (2016) and Marcé-Nogué et al. (2017) or in ungulates (Zhou et al. 2019).
Comparative methods and new developed ideas have been applied in studying several biomechanical models of primate jaws to study its implication with diet in Püschel et al. (2018) or in Marcé-Nogué et al. (2017, 2020) where, for the first time, more than 30 biomechanical models of actual primates using FEA were studied with significant results when comparing diet. The dietary preferences through biomechanicals models using FEA was also studied with success in armadillos in Serrano-Fochs et al. (2015), Marcé-Nogué et al. (2016) and Marcé-Nogué et al. (2017) or in ungulates (Zhou et al. 2019).
All these works were and are done in joined research with researchers from the Institut Català de Paleontologia “Miquel Crusafont” (Spain), University of Manchester (UK), Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo (Uruguay), Guilin University of Electronic Technology (China), Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany) and the University of Hamburg.
SELECTED REFERENCES
- Marcé-Nogué, J. (2020). Mandibular biomechanics as a key factor to understand diet in mammals. Martin, T. and Koenigswald, W. v. [eds.]: Mammalian Teeth – Form and Function. Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil, München. (url)
- Zhou, Z., Winkler, D. E., Fortuny, J., Kaiser, T. M & Marcé-Nogué, J. (2019). Why ruminating ungulates chew sloppily: Biomechanics discern a phylogenetic pattern. PLoS One. 14(4), e0214510 (url).
- Püschel, T. A., Marcé-Nogué, J., Kaiser, T. M., Brocklehurst, R. J., & Sellers, W. I. (2018). Analyzing the sclerocarpy adaptations of the Pitheciidae mandible. American Journal of Primatology, 80(5), e22759. (url).
- Marcé-Nogué, J., Püschel, T. A., & Kaiser, T. M. (2017). A biomechanical approach to understand the ecomorphological relationship between primate mandibles and diet. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 8364. (url)