Barrett Paul M, Rayfield Emily J
Department of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, UK, SW7 5BD.
Trends Ecol Evol. 2006 Apr;21(4):217-24. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2006.01.002. Epub 2006 Jan 25.
Dinosaurs had a wide variety of feeding mechanisms that strongly impacted on their ecology and evolution. Here, we show how novel application of technologies borrowed from medicine and engineering, such as CT scanning and Finite Element Analysis, have recently been combined with traditional approaches to result in significant advances in our understanding of dinosaur palaeobiology. Taxon-specific studies are providing quantitative data that can be used to generate and test functional hypotheses relating to jaw mechanics and feeding behaviour. In turn, these data form a basis for investigating larger scale patterns of ecological and macroevolutionary change, such as possible coevolutionary interactions and the influence of feeding adaptations on species richness, which are of more general interest to ecologists and evolutionary biologists.
恐龙拥有各种各样的进食机制，这些机制对它们的生态和进化产生了重大影响。在这里，我们展示了如何将从医学和工程学借鉴而来的新技术（如CT扫描和有限元分析）与传统方法相结合，从而在我们对恐龙古生物学的理解上取得了重大进展。针对特定分类群的研究正在提供定量数据，这些数据可用于生成和检验与颌骨力学及进食行为相关的功能假说。反过来，这些数据又为研究生态和宏观进化变化的更大规模模式奠定了基础，比如可能的协同进化相互作用以及进食适应性对物种丰富度的影响，而这些正是生态学家和进化生物学家更感兴趣的内容。
