Tag: Limbs

ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2009) More than a hundred years after its discovery, the limbs and vertebrae of a fossil have been pulled off the shelf at the American Museum of Natural History to revise the view of early carnivore lifestyles.
Carnivores -- currently a diverse group of mostly meat-eating mammals like bears, cats, raccoons, seals, and hyenas -- had been considered arboreal in their early evolutionary history.
But now that the skeleton of 'Miacis' uintensis has been unpacked from its matrix of sandstone, it is clear that some early carnivores were built to walk on the ground at least part of the time. The new research is published this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Brain signals can drive arm movement in a monkey with a paralyzed arm.

A monkey with a paralyzed arm can still grasp a ball, thanks to a novel system designed to translate brain signals into complex muscle movements in real time. The research, presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago this week, could one day allow people with spinal cord injury to control their own limbs.