Anatomy and Adaptations of Early Eocene Mammals from Wyoming

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The Bighorn Basin of Wyoming has a richly fossiliferous sedimentary sequence of Eocene age. It has yielded an extraordinarily dense record of vertebrate fossils, most of which are teeth, jaws, or more rarely, skulls. This has left open the question of how the these mammals functioned ecologically (locomotion being the primary question). The Eocene was a time interval in which the modern families of vertebrates were becoming differentiated, so a better understanding of their locomotion would be particularly valuable. Dr. Kenneth Rose has devoted years of effort to making detailed fossil collections that document these evolutionary events. He proposes to continue his efforts to collect new post-cranial remains, and to use these and existing collections in an analysis of function and behavior. Dr. Rose will use the most current approaches to studying the shapes and functions of fossil bone, including microcomputer- based image analysis as well as statistical comparisons with living mammals. The proposed research will attract an audience beyond vertebrate paleontologists interested in the Eocene. Mammalogists and functional morphologists will gain new insight into the early functional repertoire of mammalian families, and evolutionary biologists will take interest in the process by which new functional complexes arise in radiating families.