"Similar mechanisms probably work in humans and other bipedal animals. "This is a very economical way to move," Roberts said. These tendons work sort of like a pogo stick snapping back after a jump, so the muscle itself doesn't have to provide all the work needed in locomotion. Roberts and his colleagues, for instance, discovered that turkeys have a passive force mechanism in their stiff, calcified tendons - those stringy things in a turkey leg that often make it one of the less desirable cuts on a Thanksgiving dinner table. Such techniques as the surgical implantation of sensors in the legs of a turkey running on a treadmill help reveal their secrets of motion. But now the subtleties of movement are also starting to become more clear. Scientists have known for some time that large animals such as an elephant can move their body mass far more efficiently than small animals such as an ant or mouse, using such comparisons as the amount of energy used to move a gram of mass one meter. In that quest, Roberts has studied everything from the scurrying of mice to the respiration of African elephants, fitted out with masks and other instruments over their huge trunks to help analyze oxygen consumption and metabolic rate.
But right now there's still a great deal we don't understand about how animals move and why they function the way they do."
"Information such as this will be of value for some human health issues, such as gait dysfunction or athletic training. "We're trying to understand how locomotor function works from the cellular level on up," Roberts said. Although animals of all types have been running, jumping and scurrying since the dawn of time, scientists are only now determining with any scientific accuracy just how they get from point A to B. Those findings and a number of others are the result of groundbreaking, published research on the comparative physiology and locomotor function of different animal species - including humans - by Thomas Roberts, an assistant professor of zoology at Oregon State University. We use our locomotor energy much more efficiently than mice. High jumpers who want to clear the bar with room to spare should definitely be training with frogs, who get far more length on their jump than their musculature should allow.īut for those of us who seem to spend all our time running hard and getting nowhere, take heart. CORVALLIS - Humans who want to run more effortlessly ought to stride like a turkey.
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