Quoting the College of Arts + Sciences Faculty News: "The box of lumbar vertebrae had already been on quite the trek. Housed in the University of Wyoming, they were shipped cross-country to Bloomington and were now scaling up the Midwest in the trunk of Anne Kort’s car to Minneapolis.
Kort was on her way to the University of Minnesota to analyze the bones with a micro-CT scanner in hopes of understanding how early mammals moved. Outside, temperatures approached freezing, too cold for 20-million-year-old bones. So, the 2023 IU Ph.D. awardee stopped at her mother-in-law’s home in Madison, Wisconsin, for the night. The next morning, she and the bones bid her host goodbye and carried on with their journey to the CT scanner.
What she found from those 3D scans —and from scans of 48 other species— was that placental mammals had varied shapes of lumbar vertebrae that allowed them to move in specialized ways and that this range of motion likely developed earlier than previously thought. Kort’s findings, published in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society, encourage researchers to think differently about how early mammals may have moved and to reconsider traditional locomotor classifications."
The College of Arts