@ARTICLE{TreeBASE2Ref25490, author = {Stephanie A Martin and Bader H. Alhajeri and Scott J. Steppan}, title = {Dietary adaptations in the teeth of murine rodents (Muridae): a test of biomechanical predictions}, year = {2016}, keywords = {dental evolution ? diet ? discriminant function analysis ? functional morphology ? geometric morphometrics ? molecular phylogenetics ? multivariate analysis of variance ? Murinae ? phylogenetic comparative methods ? principal component analysis}, doi = {}, url = {http://}, pmid = {}, journal = {Biological Journal of the Linnean Society}, volume = {}, number = {}, pages = {}, abstract = {Dental morphology reflects an organism's diet. Functional dental theory predicts that tooth shape responds evolutionarily to the mechanical properties of food. Most studies of mammalian teeth have focused on qualitative measures of dental anatomy and have not formally tested how the functional components of teeth adapt in response to diet. Here we generated a series of predictions for tooth morphology based on biomechanical models of food processing. We used murine rodents (Old World rats and mice) to test these predictions for the relationship between diet and tooth shape and, further, to identify a suite of functional dental characters that best predict diets. Eighty-eight dental characters were extracted from images of the incisors, in addition to the upper and lower tooth rows, for 98 species. Results showed that species with plant-dominated diets had deep incisors, longer third molars, longer molar crests, blunt posteriorly angled cusps, and more expanded laterally oriented occlusal cusps than species with animal-dominated diets. Measures of incisor depth, crest length, cusp angle and sharpness, occlusal cusp orientation, and the lengths of third molars proved the best predictors of diet. Accounting for evolutionary history in a phylogenetic discriminant function analysis notably improved the classification accuracy. Our results show that molar morphology is strongly correlated with diet and suggest that these specific aspects of dental morphology can be used to infer diet with good accuracy for both extinct and extant murine species.} }

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