Dataset for "Developmental Factors Influencing Bone Quality in Precocial Mammals: An Infant Pig Model"

Most vertebrates are precocial in locomotion, able to walk and run soon after birth. Precociality requires a bony skeleton of sufficient quality to resist mechanical loading during early locomotor efforts. The aim of this study was to use an animal model – the preterm infant pig - to investigate some of the proximate factors that might determine variation in bone quality in precocial animals. Based on prior literature, we predicted that skeletal integrity would be significantly compromised by truncated gestation (i.e., preterm birth) and reduced body mass at birth. We generated a suite of both morphometric measures (i.e., bone mineral density and cross-sectional geometry) and performance-related metrics (i.e., ability to resist loa\ding during three-point bending tests) of the appendicular skeleton of preterm and full-term infant pigs. Results showed that very few measures in our ontogenetic infant pig sample significantly varied with either gestation length or birth mass. Overall, our results contribute to a growing body of literature demonstrating the early functional capacity of the precocial infant musculoskeletal system and suggest that the bone quality phenotype of perinatal precocial mammals may be robust to the factors shown to compromise skeletal integrity in more altricial taxa.