Achievement

IGERT trainee David Green was awarded the 2009 Earnest A. Hooton Prize for outstanding student research at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology for his research using a mouse model to investigate the influence of muscle size on bone growth and its implications for interpreting the fossil record. This research integrates approaches from developmental biology (here, using a myostatin GDF8 knockout mouse strain) with human paleontology, allowing us to make more reliable inferences about function and activity from fossil bone remains. Green found that some aspects of scapula shape (e.g., infraspinous fossa size) change during growth in a manner that likely reflects how activity changes during growth.