The Better to Bite Fruit With: Natural Selection Shapes Mechanical Advantage in Bats

It's bat evolution that interests Stony Brook University Assistant Professor Liliana M. Davalos, who joined forces with Dr. Elizabeth Dumont, and a mechanical engineer, Dr. Ian Grosse (both of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), in a recently published paper in Evolution -- Selection For Mechanical Advantage Underlies Multiple Cranial Optima In New World Leaf-Nosed Bats -- that lays out the team's findings relating mechanical advantage to natural selection. The researchers also unveiled an engineering model of a skull that can be computationally manipulated to morph into the shape of any New World Leaf-nosed bat species, to help uncover evidence for selection in long-extinct organisms.

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