Really?

So this week was pretty productive. I finished dissecting, photographing, and everything else - ing on Tuesday. It's pretty exciting to be done with both specimens. For the rest of the week I worked on putting together my presentation, which right now means analyzing data. Because of how my project has changed, "data analysis" is basically taking the muscle data I have for the iguanas and comparing it to other animals, particularly cats and pigs. These two were chosen because there has been so much research done on them, information is abundant. All three of the animals also have different habitats, and differing forms of locomotion. 

At the lab meeting this week, we read a pretty cool animal about extinct porcupines. Did you know that they can climb trees, along with goats and grey foxes? Well they can, and it is presumed that their ancestors could as well, this being deducted from their fossils. This may perhaps be quite a leap though. Today when we look at a species, we analyze their behavior, relate this to their musculature and then connect this with their bones. With fossils, this processed is reversed. Bones are looked at for robustness, bony landmarks, relative length and composition as well as muscle scars and attachments. These things are used to determine where muscles were and their possible actions, and this is then used to determine locomotion, environment, as well as the phylogeny of its descendants and ancestors. But it's certainly not an exact science, and sometimes things seem just a little far fetched.

AA