Publications

Progress in understanding animal function has been tremendously facilitated by research conducted at field stations that provide access to locations, organisms and equipment not otherwise available in more traditional urban universities or research...

Skeletal joint morphology and mobility underlie movement, behavior and ecology in vertebrates. Joints can be categorized by their shape and articulation type, but such schemes might be unreliable for inferring function across the full diversity of...

Birds frequently must land (safely) on moving branches, and seemingly accomplish this with acrobatic precision. To examine how birds target and land on moving supports, we investigated how lovebirds approach and land on a swinging perch, driven at three...

Flying animals (birds, bats and insects) often negotiate cluttered environments, sometimes involving the need to safely transit through tight spaces between obstacles. Considering their remarkable flight capabilities, hummingbirds are suitable for gaining...

Skeletal muscle has fiber architectures ranging from simple to complex, alongside variations in fiber-type and neuro-anatomical compartmentalization. However, the functional implications of muscle subdivision into discrete functional units remain...

Abstract

Muscle models are commonly based on intrinsic properties pooled across a number of individuals, often from a different species, and rarely validated against directly measured muscle forces. Here we use a rich data set of rat medial gastrocnemius...