Current Research

Several projects are being pursued using scans in the archive:

1) How well do handmade plaster replicas of the endocranium (inside of the braincase) match the actual endocranial surface? Are there any systematic biases introduced by the plaster method (which has been the standard method for the last ~100 years). The comparison is done by registering a CT of a plaster endocast with a virtual endocast created from a CT of the crania used to make the original plaster endocast. Initial results from this work can be viewed here.

2) How well do measurements of cranial capacity derived by earlier methods (e.g., filling the endocranium with pellets) match the volumes obtained from CT's of the same specimens?

3) How do ape endocrania differ from human endocrania?  By morphing ape into human, we can characterize in 3D the differences on a voxel-by-voxel basis. Applying these methods to the study of endocrania maximizes our chance of extracting meaningful information from fossil endocasts.

4) How does the placement of the foramen magnum (where the spinal cord exits the base of the skull) differ with respect to other features of the cranial base in humans (who are bipedal) vs. apes (who are not)? This, again, allows us to better interpret fragmentary fossils of early hominids who may or may not be bipedal.

5) What is the functional purpose of large supraorbital tori (browridges)? By morphing a large sample of modern human crania into a common coordinate system, one can describe the variability on voxel-by-voxel basis. One can then map the extent to which variability at each point correlates with things like the size of different aspects of the masticatory system (e.g., size of the first molar, size of the mandibular corpus, etc.). If browridges are a form of cranial buttressing for masticatory stress, browridge morphology should correlate with these measures.