Anops kingii (Keel-headed Worm Lizard)
Project
This model of the cranium of Anops kingii is part of a collaborative project with Dr. Anthony Herrel (C.R.N.S.) and Dr. Nate Kley (SUNY Stony Brook). The goal of this project is to compare stress in the skulls of amphisbaenids that have very different skull shapes and use different digging techniques. Here, a load has been applied to the dorsal aspect of the snout to simulate the motion of pushing soil dorsally.
Organism
Anops kingii, the Keel-headed Worm Lizard, belongs to a clade of squamates known as Amphisbaenia. It is native to South America, including portions of southeast Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Limbless and fossorial, A. kingii has a skull highly modified for its underground lifestyle, representing an extreme form of the “keel-headed” amphisbaenian skull morphotype. It mainly eats arthropod larvae, especially coleopterans and lepidopterans.
Model Description
This model is composed of 316,160 4-noded tetrahedral elements connected by 89,309 nodes. Bone was considered to be linear elastic and isotropic, and it was assigned a Young's modulus (E) of 17,300 MPa and a Poisson's ratio (v) of 0.28. This model was generated using CT scans maintained by the DigiMorph digital library project (www.digimorph.org). The scans were used with permission from Dr. Jessie Maisano.
