
Karl T BatesUniversity of Liverpool | UoL · Department of Musculoskeletal Biology
Karl T Bates
Doctor of Philosophy
About
120
Publications
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Introduction
My research concentrates on the functional anatomy of terrestrial vertebrates, with particular focus on the locomotor system. My goal is to understand the links between morphology and limb biomechanics in order
to better characterize how animals achieve their full range of habitual motions. This has led
me to study a range of living tetrapods from primates to archosaurs in order to further our understanding of major evolutionary transitions in locomotor biomechanics.
Additional affiliations
Education
October 2006 - May 2010
November 2005 - October 2006
October 2001 - June 2005
Publications
Publications (120)
Background
Trimming is critical for a functioning equine hoof. Pressure distribution provides information on loading; however, information on the effects of trimming on pressure distribution is lacking.
Objectives
To describe the pressure changes of equine fore feet following trimming.
Study design
Cross‐sectional cohort study.
Methods
Fifty sou...
Endovascular navigation is a crucial aspect of minimally invasive procedures, where precise control of curvilinear instruments like guidewires is critical for successful interventions. A key challenge in this task is accurately predicting the evolving shape of the guidewire as it navigates through the vasculature, which presents complex deformation...
Musculoskeletal disease (MSD) is common in ageing cats, resulting in chronic pain and mobility impairment, but diagnosis can be challenging. We hypothesised that there would be differences between cats with and without MSD in paw pressure and spatiotemporal and kinetic gait metrics. A cohort of 53 cats, aged between 7 and 10 years from the North We...
The evolution of bipedal gait is a key adaptive feature in hominids, but the running abilities of early hominins have not been extensively studied. Here, we present physics simulations of Australopithecus afarensis that demonstrate this genus was mechanically capable of bipedal running but with absolute and relative (size-normalized) maximum speeds...
Humans and birds use very different running styles. Unlike humans, birds adopt “grounded running” at intermediate speeds—a running gait where at least one foot always maintains ground contact. Avian grounded running is a paradox: Animals usually minimize locomotor energy expenditure, but birds prefer grounded running despite incurring higher energy...
Muscle spindle abundance is highly variable in vertebrates, but the functional determinants of this variation are unclear. Recent work has shown that human leg muscles with the lowest abundance of muscle spindles primarily function to lengthen and absorb energy, while muscles with a greater spindle abundance perform active-stretch–shorten cycles wi...
Our current understanding of human gait is mostly based on studies using hard, level surfaces in a laboratory environment. However, humans navigate a wide range of different substrates every day, which incur varied demands on stability and efficiency. Several studies have shown that when walking on natural compliant substrates there is an increase...
A central concept of evolutionary biology, supported by broad scale allometric analyses, asserts that changing morphology should induce downstream changes in locomotor kinematics and energetics, and by inference selective fitness. However, if these mechanistic relationships exist at local intraspecific scales, where they could provide substrate for...
Musculoskeletal simulations can provide insights into the underlying mechanisms that govern animal locomotion. In this study, we describe the development of a new musculoskeletal model of the horse, and to our knowledge present the first fully muscle-driven, predictive simulations of equine locomotion. Our goal was to simulate a model that captures...
The subpectoral diverticulum (SPD) is an extension of the respiratory system in birds that is located between the primary muscles responsible for flapping the wing1,2. Here we survey the pulmonary apparatus in 68 avian species, and show that the SPD was present in virtually all of the soaring taxa investigated but absent in non-soarers. We find tha...
Surgical intervention is a common option for the treatment of wrist joint arthritis and traumatic wrist injury. Whether this surgery is arthrodesis or a motion preserving procedure such as arthroplasty, wrist joint biomechanics are inevitably altered. To evaluate effects of surgery on parameters such as range of motion, efficiency and carpal kinema...
The material properties of some bones are known to vary with anatomical location, orientation and position within the bone (e.g., cortical and trabecular bone). Details of the heterogeneity and anisotropy of bone is an important consideration for biomechanical studies that apply techniques such as finite element analysis, as the outcomes will be in...
Humans and birds utilize very different running styles. Unlike humans, birds adopt "grounded running" at intermediate speeds - a running gait where at least one foot is always in contact with the ground. Avian grounded running is paradoxical: animals tend to minimize locomotor energy expenditure, but birds prefer grounded running despite incurring...
Objective
To use a previously validated veterinary clinical examination sheet, Liverpool Osteoarthritis in Dogs (LOAD) questionnaire, combined with kinetic and kinematic gait analysis in dogs with/without mobility problems to demonstrate the capacity of a novel clinical metrology instrument (“GenPup-M”) to detect canine mobility impairments.
Desig...
Simple Summary
Ageing sometimes leads to changes in the size, shape and structure of muscles. This impacts their ability to perform their functions and so leads to an increased likelihood of injuries and negatively impacts quality of life. This work attempts to investigate how the structure and performance of individual muscles of the human leg may...
It is accepted that non-avian theropod dinosaurs, with their long muscular tails and small forelimbs, had a centre-of-mass close to the hip, while extant birds, with their reduced tails and enlarged wings have their mass centred more cranially. Transition between these states is considered crucial to two key innovations in the avian locomotor syste...
A reversion to secondary quadrupedality is exceptionally rare in nature, yet the convergent re-evolution of this locomotor style occurred at least four separate times within Dinosauria. Facultative quadrupedality, an intermediate state between obligate bipedality and obligate quadrupedality, may have been an important transitional step in this loco...
Across the human body, skeletal muscles have a broad range of biomechanical roles that employ complex proprioceptive control strategies to successfully execute a desired movement. This information is derived from peripherally located sensory apparatus, the muscle spindle and Golgi tendon organs. The abundance of these sensory organs, particularly m...
The secondary evolution of quadrupedality from bipedal ancestry is a rare evolutionary transition in tetrapods yet occurred convergently at least three times within ornithischian dinosaurs. Despite convergently evolving quadrupedal gait, ornithischians exhibited variable anatomy, particularly in the forelimbs, which underwent a major functional cha...
Walking on compliant substrates requires more energy than walking on hard substrates but the biomechanical factors that contribute to this increase are debated. Previous studies suggest various causative mechanical factors, including disruption to pendular energy recovery, increased muscle work, decreased muscle efficiency and increased gait variab...
Knee joint ligaments provide stability to the joint by preventing excessive movement. There has been no systematic effort to study the effect of OA and ageing on the mechanical properties of the four major human knee ligaments. This study aims to collate data on the material properties of the anterior (ACL) and posterior (PCL) cruciate ligaments, m...
Body size and shape play fundamental roles in organismal function and it is expected that animals may possess body proportions that are well-suited to their ecological niche. Tetrapods exhibit a diverse array of body shapes, but to date this diversity in body proportions and its relationship to ecology have not been systematically quantified. Using...
Muscle spindle abundance is highly variable within and across species, but we currently lack any clear picture of the mechanistic causes or consequences of this variation. Previous use of spindle abundance as a correlate for muscle function implies a mechanical underpinning to this variation, but these ideas have not been tested. Herein, we use int...
The size and arrangement of fibres play a determinate role in the kinetic and energetic performance of muscles. Extrapolations between fibre architecture and performance underpin our understanding of how muscles function and how they are adapted to power specific motions within and across species. Here we provide a synopsis of how this ‘fibre to fu...
Background. Ligaments work to stabilize the human knee joint and prevent excessive movement. Whilst ligaments are known to decline in structure and function with aging, there has been no systematic effort to study changes in gross mechanical properties in the four major human knee ligaments due to osteoarthritis (OA). This study aims to collate mat...
Hip flexor musculature was instrumental in the evolution of hominin bipedal gait and in endurance running for hunting in the genus Homo. The iliacus and psoas major muscles were historically considered to have separate tendons with different insertions on the lesser trochanter. However, in the early 20th century, it became “common knowledge” that t...
Measures of attachment or accommodation area on the skeleton are a popular means of rapidly generating estimates of muscle proportions and functional performance for use in large-scale macroevolutionary studies. Herein, we provide the first evaluation of the accuracy of these muscle area assessment (MAA) techniques for estimating muscle proportions...
Interspecies differences in locomotor efficiency have been extensively researched, but within-species variation in the metabolic cost of walking and its underlying causes have received much less attention. This is somewhat surprising given the importance of walking energetics to natural selection, and the fact that the mechanical efficiency of stri...
Background:
Recent work using large datasets (>500 records per subject) has demonstrated seemingly high levels of step-to-step variation in peak plantar pressure within human individuals during walking. One intuitive consequence of this variation is that smaller sample sizes (e.g., 10 steps per subject) may be quantitatively and qualitatively inac...
Bird necks display unparalleled levels of morphological diversity compared to other vertebrates, yet it is unclear what factors have structured this variation. Using three-dimensional geometric morphometrics and multi-variate statistics, we show that the avian cervical column is a hierarchical morpho-functional appendage, with varying magnitudes of...
Biomechanical modelling is a powerful tool for quantifying the evolution of functional performance in extinct animals to understand key anatomical innovations and selective pressures driving major evolutionary radiations. However, the fossil record is composed predominantly of hard parts, forcing palaeontologists to reconstruct soft tissue properti...
Throughout their 250 Myr history, archosaurian reptiles have exhibited a wide array of body sizes, shapes, and locomotor habits, especially in regard to terrestriality. These features make Archosauria a useful clade with which to study the interplay between body size, shape, and locomotor behavior, and how this interplay may have influenced locomot...
Musculoskeletal modelling is an important platform on which to study the biomechanics of morphological structures in vertebrates and is widely used in clinical, zoological and palaeontological fields. The popularity of this approach stems from the potential to non‐invasively quantify biologically important but difficult‐to‐measure functional parame...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0057408.].
Due to difficulty of obtaining accurate quantitative data on foot muscles, relatively little has been done to study foot muscle function in non-human apes. Gorilla feet are known to be similar in bony proportions and mechanics to those of humans, hence are key to understanding human foot evolution and its ecological context. We present the first 3D...
Functional reconstructions of extinct animals represent a crucial step towards understanding palaeocological interactions, selective pressures and macroevolutionary patterns in the fossil record. In recent years, computational approaches have revolutionised the field of 'evolutionary biomechanics' and have, in general, resulted in convergence of qu...
Osteoarthritis is traditionally associated with cartilage degeneration although is now widely accepted as a whole-joint disease affecting the entire osteochondral unit; however site-specific cartilage and bone material properties during healthy ageing and disease are absent limiting our understanding. Cadaveric specimens (n = 12; 31-88 years) with...
Owing to an error in our muscle physiological cross-sectional area calculations, the range of bite force estimates for four models in our original analysis (maximum and minimum values presented in table 2 of [1]) are approximately 6% too high. This relates specifically to error in our calculation of the effect of a 208 pennation angle on muscle phy...
Understanding how structural and functional alterations of individual tissues impact on whole-joint function is challenging, particularly in humans where direct invasive experimentation is difficult. Finite element (FE) computational models produce quantitative predictions of the mechanical and physiological behaviour of multiple tissues simultaneo...
The collection and dissemination of vertebrate ichnological data is struggling to keep up with techniques that are becoming commonplace in the wider palaeontological field. A standard protocol is required to ensure that data is recorded, presented and archived in a manner that will be useful both to contemporary researchers, and to future generatio...
Fig. S1. Renders of chicken (A,B), buzzard (C,D) and duck (E,F) showing the skin outlines (grey) and air cavities (blue) extracted from CT data and used in digital predictions of CoM position.
Fig. S2. Differences between geometric centre (bricks)/best guess digital CoM (birds) and CoM predictions produced by the methods studied here, presented as...
Appendix S1. Additional information on Material and methods.
Appendix S2. Individualmusclemomentarms.
Appendix S3. GorillaHindlimbModel.xml: Gorilla hind limb musculoskeletal model as human readable xml file, suitable for gaitsym.
Table S1. Muscle mass, fascicle length (FL) and physiological cross‐sectional area (PCSA) of muscles. Mass, FL and PCSA were scaled to body mass of the gorilla from CT scan, as shown in methods.
Fig. S1. Conventions for joint angle measurements used in the previous studies of Gorilla muscle moment arms (Payne et al. 2006b) and limb kinematics (Isl...
Video S2. Knee animation: flexion and extension of knee.
Video S3. Ankle animation: flexion and extension of ankle.
Centre of mass is a fundamental anatomical and biomechanical parameter. Knowledge of centre of mass is essential to inform studies investigating locomotion and other behaviours, through its implications for segment movements, and on whole body factors such as posture. Previous studies have estimated centre of mass position for a range of organisms,...
The running ability of Tyrannosaurus rex has been intensively studied due to its relevance to interpretations of feeding behaviour and the biomechanics of scaling in giant predatory dinosaurs. Different studies using differing methodologies have produced a very wide range of top speed estimates and there is therefore a need to develop techniques th...
Body Mass Calculations
The input file for the simulator for the fast run at 400 MPa limit
The input file for the simulator for the fast grounded gait at 100 MPa limit
The output of the simulator for the fast grounded gait at 100 MPa limit
The output of the simulator for the fast run at 400 MPa limit
Three-dimensional musculoskeletal models have become increasingly common for investigating muscle moment arms in studies of vertebrate locomotion. In this study we present the first musculoskeletal model of a western lowland gorilla hind limb. Moment arms of individual muscles around the hip, knee and ankle were compared with previously published d...
Supplementary material
Understanding how structural and functional alterations of individual tissues impact on whole-joint function is challenging, particularly in humans where direct invasive experimentation is difficult. Finite element computational models produce quantitative predictions of the mechanical and physiological behaviour of multiple tissues simultaneously,...
Understanding how structural and functional alterations of individual tissues impact on whole-joint function is challenging, particularly in humans where direct invasive experimentation is difficult. Finite element computational models produce quantitative predictions of the mechanical and physiological behaviour of multiple tissues simultaneously,...
Over the past two decades, the development of methods for visualizing and analysing specimens digitally, in three and even four dimensions, has transformed the study of living and fossil organisms. However, the initial promise that the widespread application of such methods would facilitate access to the underlying digital data has not been fully a...
Tissue material properties are crucial to understanding their mechanical function, both in healthy and diseased states. However, in certain circumstances logistical limitations can prevent testing on fresh samples necessitating one or more freeze-thaw cycles. To date, the nature and extent to which the material properties of articular cartilage are...
During walking, variability in step parameters allows the body to adapt to changes in substrate or unexpected perturbations that may occur as the feet interface with the environment. Despite a rich literature describing biomechanical variability in step parameters, there are as yet no studies that consider variability at the body-environment interf...
The colossal size and body plan of sauropod dinosaurs are unparalleled in terrestrial vertebrates. However, to date, there have been only limited attempts to examine temporal and phylogenetic patterns in the sauropod bauplan. Here, we combine three-dimensional computational models with phylogenetic reconstructions to quantify the evolution of whole...
Sex differences in locomotor performance may precede the onset of sexual maturity and/or arise concomitantly with secondary sex characteristics. Here, we present the first study to quantify the terrestrial locomotor morphology, energetics and kinematics in a species, either side of sexual maturation. In domestic leghorn chickens (Gallus gallus dome...