ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2016
Moa diet fits the bill: virtual reconstruction incorporating mummified remains and prediction of biomechanical performance in avian giants.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 58 citations in OpenAlex.
- How complex must shape data be to model in vivo forces? Intraspecific level validation of in silico jaw strength estimates in a lizard.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Sharper, straighter, stiffer, stronger: sexually dimorphic bill shape enhances male stabbing performance in the green hermit hummingbird (Phaethornis guy).The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Unexpectedly uneven distribution of functional trade-offs explains cranial morphological diversity in carnivores.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Bill shape imposes biomechanical tradeoffs in cavity-excavating birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Genetic evidence for post-glacial expansion from a southern refugium in the eastern moa (Biology letters · 2022Article
- Article
- New Zealand's extinct giant raptor (Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- True colours or red herrings?: colour maps for finite-element analysis in palaeontological studies to enhance interpretation and accessibility.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- The diet of early birds based on modern and fossil evidence and a new framework for its reconstruction.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2021Review
- Egg Incubation Mechanics of Giant Birds.Biology · 2021Article
- Evolutionary biomechanics: hard tissues and soft evidence?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- Head to head: the case for fighting behaviour inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Raptor talon shape and biomechanical performance are controlled by relative prey size but not by allometry.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Computational biomechanical analyses demonstrate similar shell-crushing abilities in modern and ancient arthropods.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Resurrecting Darwin's Niata - anatomical, biomechanical, genetic, and morphometric studies of morphological novelty in cattle.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Coprolites reveal ecological interactions lost with the extinction of New Zealand birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- The intervals method: a new approach to analyse finite element outputs using multivariate statistics.PeerJ · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 6 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The moa (Dinornithiformes) are large to gigantic extinct terrestrial birds of New Zealand. Knowledge about niche partitioning, feeding mode and preference among moa species is limited, hampering palaeoecological reconstruction and evaluation of the impacts of their extinction on remnant native biota, or the viability of exotic species as proposed ecological 'surrogates'. Here we apply three-dimensional finite-element analysis to compare the biomechanical performance of skulls from five of the six moa genera, and two extant ratites, to predict the range of moa feeding behaviours relative to each other and to living relatives. Mechanical performance during biting was compared using simulations of the birds clipping twigs based on muscle reconstruction of mummified moa remains. Other simulated food acquisition strategies included lateral shaking, pullback and dorsoventral movement of the skull. We found evidence for limited overlap in biomechanical performance between the extant emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) and extinct upland moa (Megalapteryx didinus) based on similarities in mandibular stress distribution in two loading cases, but overall our findings suggest that moa species exploited their habitats in different ways, relative to both each other and extant ratites. The broad range of feeding strategies used by moa, as inferred from interspecific differences in biomechanical performance of the skull, provides insight into mechanisms that facilitated high diversities of these avian herbivores in prehistoric New Zealand.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.