Abstract
Understanding the mechanically-mediated response of trabecular bone to locomotion-specific loading patterns would be of great benefit to comparative mammalian evolutionary morphology. Unfortunately, assessments of the correspondence between individual trabecular bone features and inferred behavior patterns have failed to reveal a strong locomotion-specific signal. This study assesses the relationship between inferred locomotor activity and a suite of trabecular bone structural features that characterize bone architecture. High-resolution computed tomography images were collected from the humeral and femoral heads of 115 individuals from eight anthropoid primate genera (Alouatta, Homo, Macaca, Pan, Papio, Pongo, Trachypithecus, Symphalangus). Discriminant function analyses reveal that subarticular trabecular bone in the femoral and humeral heads is significantly different among most locomotor groups. The results indicate that when a suite of femoral head trabecular features is considered, trabecular number and connectivity density, together with fabric anisotropy and the relative proportion of rods and plates, differentiate locomotor groups reasonably well. A similar, yet weaker, relationship is also evident in the trabecular architecture of the humeral head. The application of this multivariate approach to analyses of trabecular bone morphology in recent and fossil primates may enhance our ability to reconstruct locomotor behavior in the fossil record.
Highlights
Trabecular bone plays a significant structural role in the skeletal system [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] and has been shown to respond to the loading environment throughout ontogeny [10,11,12,13]
Trabecular Bone Structural Analysis All bones were scanned on the OMNI-X HD-600 High-Resolution X-ray computed tomography (HRCT) scanner (Varian Medical Systems, Lincolnshire, IL) at the Center for Quantitative Imaging (CQI) at The Pennsylvania State University (PSU)
The stepwise analysis of femoral head trabecular bone morphology for the complete sample generated two significant discriminant functions (p,0.001) that account for 68.5% and 23.1% of the variance, respectively (Figure 2)
Summary
Trabecular bone plays a significant structural role in the skeletal system [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] and has been shown to respond to the loading environment throughout ontogeny [10,11,12,13]. Despite its clearly mechanical function, attempts to identify locomotion-specific architectural characteristics in the postcranial trabeculae of primates have produced largely mixed results [11,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. The fundamental question of whether trabecular bone architecture in complex postcranial joints, such as the proximal femur and humerus, reflects a strong locomotion-specific signal remains unresolved. Demonstration of a strong functional signal within trabecular bone would aid reconstructions of locomotor behaviors in the fossil and archaeological record
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