Projects
1255 Projects

Media are grouped by projects created by users. Projects tend to contain media tied together by a theme. A project might represent the dataset for a single peer-reviewed paper, the results of a collections digitization project, or data for a digital lesson plan.

Projects can be used to share media ownership and access between project members, and projects can also be used to publish assortments of media and specimens for access and discovery by the public. If you want to share media ownership and access with multiple users across multiple projects, consider creating a user team. Projects can be managed by teams, and users with access to that team also gain access to any projects managed by that team.

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Listing of items you have deposited in MorphoSource
Title Description Team Creator Media Objects
Display all details of Earliest giant panda false thumb suggests conflicting demands for locomotion and feeding Wang, X., D. F. Su, N. G. Jablonski, X. Ji, J. Kelley, L. J. Flynn, and T. Deng. 2022. Earliest giant panda false thumb suggests conflicting demands for locomotion and feeding. Scientific Reports 12(1): 10538. Abstract: Of the many peculiarities that enable the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), a member of the order Carnivora, to adapt to life as a dedicated bamboo feeder, its extra “thumb” is arguably the most celebrated yet enigmatic. In addition to the normal five digits in the hands of most mammals, the giant panda has a greatly enlarged wrist bone, the radial sesamoid, that acts as a sixth digit, an opposable “thumb” for manipulating bamboo. We report the earliest enlarged radial sesamoid, already a functional opposable “thumb,” in the ancestral panda Ailurarctos from the late Miocene site of Shuitangba in Yunnan Province, China. However, since the late Miocene, the “thumb” has not enlarged further because it must be balanced with the constraints of weight bearing while walking in a plantigrade posture. This morphological adaptation in panda evolution thus reflects a dual function of the radial sesamoid for both bamboo manipulation and weight distribution. The latter constraint could be the main reason why the panda’s false thumb never evolved into a full digit. This crude “thumb” suggests that the origin of the panda’s dedicated bamboo diet goes back to as early as 6–7 Ma. Xiaoming Wang 2 2
Display all details of Brains of fossil carnivores In this project we study endocranial casts of fossil carnivores 5 5
Display all details of NMHM Paleopathology Digital repository of paleopathological specimens from the National Museum of Health and Medicine National Museum of Health and Medicine 59 36
Display all details of 3D pollination biology of cacao Despite the economic importance of chocolate and that insect pollinators have been shown to limit cacao crop yields, little is known about the highly specialized pollination biology of Theobroma cacao L., and even less about its relatives, Byttneria spp., Ayenia spp., and Guazuma spp. For pollination, insects must go through Cacao’s bizarre petals (petal sacs) to come into contact with the pollen-containing anthers. Then, they need to either escape the petals and fly to another flower (for cross pollination) or come into contact with the pollen-receiving stigma (for self pollination). Acquiring and depositing pollen via movement through these intricate 3-dimensional structures is size- and geometry-specific. For example, if an insect is too small or not the right shape, it could crawl through the flower without interacting with the anthers or stigma at all. Ceratopogonid midges (Diptera) are often named cacao’s main pollinator, but field studies have found higher visitation rates for other small dipterans. It is also possible that different insects are responsible for population across cacao’s range. To determine the functional size limits of cacao’s pollinators, 3D measurements of floral structures can be used and compared with suspected pollinator dimensions to make hypotheses on which floral visitors are most likely to be successful. To precisely quantify plant-pollinator geometry and functional size limits of an effective pollinator for cacao and its relatives, we are using microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) and 3D geometric morphometrics. Wolcott, Katherine 41 7
Display all details of 3D micro-CT of the oldest Citrullus seeds from Libya and Egypt compared to extant seeds Archaeological research on the domestication history of watermelons has focused on seeds found at settlements where people either ate the sweet fruit pulp, the fat-rich seeds, or used the oil extracted from seeds. The earliest seeds assigned to Citrullus lanatus and C. colocynthis come from the Libyan archaeological site Uan Muhuggiag, but stratigraphic evidence suggested that it had been disturbed and contained younger intrusive material. We used 3D x-ray-micro-CT to investigate whether ancient Citrullus seeds can be reliably assigned to C. lanatus or C. colocynthis, using seeds from all but one extant species of Citrullus as well as seeds from Tutankhamun’s tomb at Thebes and from Uan Muhuggiag. Wolcott, Katherine 32 10
Display all details of 3D atlas of tinamou (Neornithes: Tinamidae) pectoral morphology: implications for reconstructing the ancestral neornithine flight apparatus 55 1
Display all details of The dental system of †Kazanichthys viatkensis (Actinopterygii: Acrolepididae) from the middle Permian of European Russia; palaeobiological and palaeoecological inferences 2 2
Display all details of Hwiccewyrm trispiculum UMZC 2023.4.1 – UMZC 2023.4.51 CT-datasets (three .zip files containing .tif images) and 3D meshes (.zip file containing 44 .stl files) of holotype and material referred to Hwiccewyrm trispiculum, and some unreferred material (eight elements, .stl files in subfolder). Note eight referred specimens (UMZC 2023.4.10, UMZC 2023.4.27–28, UMZC 2023.4.35–38, and UMZC 2023.4.47) were not scanned. 4 4
Display all details of Rostral neurovasculature indicates sensory trade-offs in Mesozoic pelagic crocodylomorphs Segmentations for the paper by Bowman et al. 8 4
Display all details of Rodentia Endocasts Project 108 50
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