Carnivoran Jaw Shape

Carnivoran jaw shape.

Carnivoran paleoguilds of Africa: implications for hominid food procurement strategies.

Tool-using hominids, as carnivorous animals, would have been part of the various carnivore guilds present in Plio-Pleistocene Africa. Hominid dietary strategies must be understood within the larger context of carnivore behavior and ecology, as carnivorans could have affected the abilities of hominids to procure meat and/or marrow. The functional anatomy of extant and fossil carnivorans was exam...

Ecological causes of decelerating diversification in carnivoran mammals.

Clade diversification is a central topic in macroevolutionary studies. Recently, it has been shown that diversification rates appear to decelerate over time in many clades. What causes this deceleration remains unclear, but it has been proposed that competition for limited resources between sympatric, ecologically similar species slows diversification. Employing carnivoran mammals as a model sy...

Carnivoran Remains from the Malapa Hominin Site, South Africa

Recent discoveries at the new hominin-bearing deposits of Malapa, South Africa, have yielded a rich faunal assemblage associated with the newly described hominin taxon Australopithecus sediba. Dating of this deposit using U-Pb and palaeomagnetic methods has provided an age of 1.977 Ma, being one of the most accurately dated, time constrained deposits in the Plio-Pleistocene of southern Africa. ...

Novel Image-Based 3D Reconstruction of the Human Jaw using Shape from Shading and Feature Descriptors

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for 3D surface reconstruction of the human jaw. Due to the difficulties of setting up a data acquisition system inside the mouth, we use an intra-oral camera to capture a sequence of calibrated images. These images are registered together to build a panoramic view of the jaw. We incorporate a shape from shading(SFS) algorithm that benefits from camera ...