Congratulations to Nick Famoso and Edward Davis who’s paper, “On the relationship between enamel band complexity and occlusal surface area in Equids (Mammalia, Perissodactyla),” came out today in the journal PeerJ. They used fractals to quantify enamel band complexity on the chewing surface of horse teeth and investigated the relationship between complexity and body size while accounting for phylogeny. They found that as horses get bigger, their teeth become less complex!  You may view the paper here.

Figure 4: Phylogeny used in this study with continuous characters, tooth area and fractal dimensionality (D), mapped onto the tree. This tree is a time-scaled (Ma) informal supertree. Characters were mapped using the contMap function in the phytools package version 0.4–45 (Revell, 2012) implemented in R. Length refers to the length of the legend in units of branch length. † = extinct taxon.