Daniel Varajão de Latorre

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Integrative Biology

While the mammalian baculum shows enormous morphological variability, the baculum of canids is highly conserved, with most variation restricted to size. Here, we explore the allometric relationship between baculum length and body size in extant and extinct canids. Examination of 26 species in the extant subfamily Caninae using standard linear regre...

Placerias hesternus, a Late Triassic dicynodont, is one of the last megafaunal synapsids of the Mesozoic. The species has a tusk-like projection on its maxillary bone, known as the caniniform process. This process has been hypothesized to be sexually dimorphic since the 1950s, however this claim has not been thoroughly investigated quantitatively....

Measurement theory, a branch of applied mathematics, offers guiding principles for extracting meaning from empirical observations and is applicable to any science involving measurements. Measurement theory is highly relevant in paleobiology because statistical approaches assuming ratio-scaled variables are commonly used on data belonging to nominal...

The baculum of mammals offers the opportunity to study the reproductive biology of extinct species given that it is a fossilizable part of the male genitalia and that its size and shape correlate with several aspects of the reproductive biology of extant mammals. Fossil bacula, however, are rare. Currently, bacula have been described from only two...

Interested in the absolute preservation rate of one of the best understood dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex, Marshall et al. (2021) estimated the total number that ever lived. This required estimating its geographic range, longevity, and population density, which required estimating its body mass and physiology. Meiri (2021) questions the precision of...

Placerias hesternus is a Late Triassic dicynodont, and one of the last megafaunal synapsids of the Mesozoic. The species has tusk-like projections of maxillary bone, known as caniniform processes, that have been speculated to be sexually dimorphic since the 1950s, but this claim has never been thoroughly investigated quantitatively. This study exam...

Estimating dinosaur abundance Estimating the abundance of a species is a common practice for extant species and can reveal many aspects of its ecology, evolution, and threat level. Estimating abundance for species that are extinct, especially those long extinct, is a much trickier endeavor. Marshall et al. used a relationship established between bo...