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Showing posts from October, 2013

Lizard tricks: overcoming conflicting requirements of speed versus climbing ability by altering biomechanics of the lizard stride

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So recently I managed to publish a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology about my dissertation work looking at the locomotion in Australia's biggest and baddest lizards the monitor lizards. I called it 'Lizard Tricks', not only cause I think they are doing something neat, but because I think what we see in these lizards would be a nice little engineering principal we could use in the design of robots or something else equally awesome. Ignoring for now that it took me over 6 years to figure this all out, I'd like to try and explain how I finally got to this point, and where we are with our understanding of locomotion in these beasts. All good studies should always start as simply as possible, and this is certainly where we began. In our earliest studies we compared the morphology of different species with their retreat site (Thompson et al. 2008). What we saw is that burrowing species tended to be different, from those that retreat into tree hollows, as sho