Lab alumna Kelsey Stilson and PI’s Drs. Hopkins and Davis published a paper today discussing the evolution of arthritis in rhinos in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. They found that with increased mass, adaptation to running, and increased life span, there is an increase in arthritis in the limb bones of rhinos. Congratulations on your paper!
Figure 1: Time-calibrated phylogeny of rhinocerotid taxa used in this study with outgroup H. eximius. The thicker bars indicate the actual first and last appearance data (FAD and LAD) of the fossil localities included, not the comprehensive range of the species. D. bicornis has no blue line because only modern bones were examined. Tree was pruned from Cerdeño’s 1998 morphologic phylogeny or Rhinocerotidae and time-calibrated in RStudio using the ‘equal’ setting in the function timePaleoPhy() in the software package ‘Paleotree’. Tree was set to be fully dichotomous and to extend all the way to the LAD.
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