Thread by @armanafzadeh

Thrilled to share the culmination of >4,000 hours of #XROMM analysis, out #OA in @PNASNews! Here we propose a new role for joint mobility in reconstructing vertebrate locomotor evolution -- a small contribution toward reframing this fundamental problem 🦖 pnas.org/content/118/7/…

It’s been a real journey. To collect the necessary data, my life from 2016-2020 became a blur of perpetual point-tracking...

https://twitter.com/armanafzadeh/status/1230543907014029312

… which included more than one desperate plea for specimens (you’re the best @VTechmeetsPaleo 🥰)...

https://twitter.com/armanafzadeh/status/1184507470904987648

… plus the need to figure out how to effectively manipulate and do #XROMM on intact cadavers.

https://twitter.com/armanafzadeh/status/1327045615809867777

At first, I had myself convinced that joint mobility wasn’t very informative at all (and gave a couple of pretty inflammatory conference talks to that effect -- um, whoops).

https://twitter.com/Fishguy_FHL/status/1154369444174532609

But soon I realized that we’ve all been studying mobility based on distorted plots. In early COVID quarantine, I did some ~math~ and figured out that a 16th c. world map could be used to solve the problem.

https://twitter.com/armanafzadeh/status/1290287352766595073

So I replotted all the data, and here we (finally) are today! These results came as a huge but pleasant surprise to me, and I can’t wait to dig into their morphological basis.

Well, that’s enough of a stroll down memory lane. In lieu of an actually informative thread, you can find a great summary of our work by @corrie_pikul @BrownUResearch here: brown.edu/news/2021-02-0…

Many thanks to @NeilShubin for his work as editor and to @VTechmeetsPaleo, @AdskMaya, @NSF @NSFGRFP, @SigmaXiSociety, @BrownUniversity @BrownGradSchool, @SVP_vertpaleo, @AWG_org, and @PaleoSoc for resources and funding that made this work possible.

PS, this paper is just the first of many to come from this dataset, and I’ve got some exciting projects in the works -- so keep an eye out for more on #jointsjointsjoints soon! CC @EEB_Brown @BrownMedicine @SICB_DCB_DVM @IntWomxnBiomech