Myology of Hystricognath Rodents: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Phylogeny

Abstract

Muscles have been used as valuable morphological characters in a number of analyses of the phylogenetic relationships of rodents and other mammals (see literature cited in Rinker, 1954; Klingener, 1964; Woods, 1972). The location, innervation, size, shape, number of parts, relative position, presence or absence, and even function of muscles have been used to establish the phylogenetic relationships of various rodent taxa. While comparisons of the form of muscles go back to the time of Vesalius (1543), and Tyson (1699) used muscles in his comparison of various primates, most early works were mainly concerned with descriptive myology. It was not until the great flowering of comparative anatomy in the middle of the last century that careful comparative analyses of musculature were used to formulate hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships.