Nicolai Konow
Associate Professor
UMass Lowell
The first section of my talk will discuss how force production by skeletal muscle is shaped across scales of biological organization and evolves to meet ecological requirements. In natural experiments using lab and garden-variety rodents, we show how jaw muscle force is shaped from molecular interactions, via sarcomere- and fiber-scale phenomena, to craniofacial apparatus leverage, centered around understanding the function of an ancient masticatory isoform of myosin. The second section will discuss biomechanics of food processing in association with tetrapod terrestrialization. Studies of fins-to-limbs and gills-to-lung transitions provide unconvincing explanations as to why the Devonian invasion of land by early tetrapods took so long (approx. 100MY). Evidence from an extant phylogenetic bracket approach using lunged fishes and salamanders suggest that food processing biomechanics undergo switches between aquatic and terrestrial feeders, including changes to hydraulic food shuttling, intraoral tongue control of food, and shifts in the tongue and jaw coordination sequence between aquatic and terrestrial anamniotes.