{"id":291456,"date":"2017-03-23T12:33:54","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T16:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=2a3b0dae79716993cbaa4eda7cda040f"},"modified":"2017-03-23T12:33:54","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T16:33:54","slug":"how-chewing-like-a-cow-helped-early-mammals-thrive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=291456","title":{"rendered":"How chewing like a cow helped early mammals thrive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You probably haven&#8217;t given much thought to how you chew, but the jaw structure and mechanics of almost all modern mammals may have something to do with why we&#8217;re here today. In a new paper published this week in Scientific Reports, David Grossnickle, a graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, proposes that mammal teeth, jaw bones and muscles evolved to produce side-to-side motions of the jaw, or yaw, that allowed our earliest ancestors to grind food with their molars and eat a more diversified diet. These changes may have been a contributing factor to their survival of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You probably haven&#8217;t given much thought to how you chew, but the jaw structure and mechanics of almost all modern mammals may have something to do with why we&#8217;re here today. In a new paper published this week in Scientific Reports, David Grossnickle, a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=291456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":291457,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291456\/revisions\/291457"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=291456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=291456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=291456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}