The mammalian skull: development, structure, and function

Ruf I., Meng J., Fostowicz-Frelik Ł 2023. Auditory region circulation in Lagomorpha: the internal carotid artery pattern revisited. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378, 20220088, doi:10.1098/rstb.2022.0088

The internal carotid artery (ICA) is one of the main vessels in the cranial circulation. Because the ICA openings, canals, and groves can be studied also in fossils, these characters have been used often in comprehensive phylogenetic analyses. We studied the ICA-related features in 11 genera of living lagomorphs and key extinct taxa using μCT data. Our results show that the proposed ancestral state of the ICA course for Lagomorpha is similar to that of the earliest rodents, plesiadapids, and scandentians, and support lagomorphs as as a morphologically conservative clade in contrast to its counterpart, rodents.