Image description: I am pictured here with a large chunk of T. rex femur that I recently found while surveying the Hell Creek Formation of Northeastern Montana.
Nick Thurber
USA
May 26, 2026
Correlation of typical behavior with hind-body and forebody morphology of mammals
The skeletal morphology of mammals has been used to infer behavior by countless functional morphologists with most implementing forebody morphology into their research and some implementing traits from throughout the body. The extent that hind-body morphology is reflected in mammalian behavior has yet to be thoroughly researched and compared to forebody morphology. Here I compare lever-arms from forebody joints to those from hind-body joints over sixteen locomotor categories, based on 277 extant mammal species. The classification rates from linear discriminant analyses (LDA) suggest that forebody traits are most effective at discriminating specialized lifestyles and hind-body traits are more effective at discriminating unspecialized lifestyles involving semi-aquatic paddling and walking. The LDA was only able to classify specialized and unspecialized lifestyles with high accuracy after being performed with a dataset that included forebody and hind-body traits revealing the ability of LDA to infer the behaviors of extinct mammals when performed on traits from throughout the body.
Image description:
Sayoni Banerjee
India
June 2, 2026
Invertebrate Palaeontology Palaeoecology
TBD
Pal(a)eoPERCS 