The gang discusses two papers that look at functional morphology in extinct groups. The first paper looks at tooth replacement patterns in an Ornithischian dinosaur, and the second paper studies the shell articulation of Rafinesquina to unravel a long-standing mystery. Meanwhile, James has questions about taste, Amanda forgets protocol, and Curt indulges in his fixations.

Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):

The friends talk about two papers that look at how animals did things a long time ago. The first paper looks at a group of big angry animals that are liked a lot and make their way into movies. This paper looks at how the teeth of some of these animals would grow over time. This group of big angry animals also does a lot of cool things with their teeth over a long time because they move from eating animals to eating things that do not move and make their own food from the sun. The big angry animals that they look at have lot of these animals from a lot of different ages so they can see how the teeth get changed as they grew up. What they see is that the way that the teeth grow in changes as the animal grows older. They also find that the number of times that new teeth come in has changed many times in this group of animals.

The second paper looks at a group of animals with two hard parts on either side that sits and eats food from the water. This group of animals has really made people confused for a long time because of how the hard parts come together, which could make it so that the animals could not get water inside to eat and would instead get a lot of ground and die. But this group of animals is really good at what it does because it is found all around the world. So how did these things eat? The paper shows that these animals could move their hard parts a lot more than we ever thought. Also, they show that they could move them pretty quick, and could even push out water so quickly that they could maybe move a little bit if they get covered in the ground.

References:

Hu, Jinfeng, et al. "Tooth replacement in the early-diverging neornithischian Jeholosaurus shangyuanensis and implications for dental evolution and herbivorous adaptation in Ornithischia." BMC Ecology and Evolution 24.1 (2024): 46.

Dattilo, Benjamin F., et al. "Paradox lost: wide gape in the Ordovician brachiopod Rafinesquina explains how unattached filter‐feeding strophomenoids thrived on muddy substrates." Palaeontology 67.2 (2024): e12697.