A lot of our current lab work has been focused on 3D modeling of the muscles involved in opening and closing the jaw in Neotropical leaf-nosed bats. We use iodine to stain cranial soft tissues, which enhances contrast before taking microCT scans of different bat species. This allows us to image the anatomy in great detail, and to study the muscle proportions and attachments in these very small mammals prior to dissecting the muscles. We can then segment out individual muscles and create 3D meshes that can be implemented in our bite force models! The slideshow below shows a raw, black-and-white coronal scan slice through the head of a frog-eating bat, Trachops cirrhosus, and several images of the reconstructed 3D jaw adductors.

[slideshow_deploy id=’904′]