Body and tail-assisted pitch control facilitates bipedal locomotion in Australian agamid lizards (original) (raw)

“…Functionally, this facilitates larger muscle moment arms, longer stride lengths and greater ground clearance, all of which contribute to more powerful strides and greater support for the body on two limbs. Values echoing these factors are consistently found in the literature (Snyder, 1954(Snyder, , 1962Christian, Horn & Preuschoft, 1994;Hsieh, 2003;Clemente & Wu, 2018), contributing to work on musculoskeletal modelling of the facultative locomotor mode in these animals (Aerts et al, 2003). Interestingly, the gradient of SVL to hindlimb segment length remains similar across locomotor modes, indicating a largely mechanical relationship between body size and locomotor demands in this group, that is the size of long bones is constrained by locomotor mode (differences in intercept between locomotor modes), as opposed to body size (signified by differences in gradient between the two modes).…”