And just for fun, think about how you can stand up like an emu.

It also has practical applications in fields like robotics 🤖 and animal welfare 🐓
See below a video of Troody created by Peter Dilworth from MIT.

Understanding how emus and other species stand up will provide important implications for how non-locomotor behaviours shape musculoskeletal form and function and drive evolutionary adaptions.

See the cool video of our simulations!

Measuring muscle activations and forces directly is tough, so we combined experiments with computer simulations of musculoskeletal biomechanics to estimate how emus use their muscles to stand up. 👩‍💻🍗

In our study, we focused on emus 🦵, and we collected data from force platforms that the emus used to stand up and motion capture cameras.
See below a video of our experiment.

Unlike humans, animals do not normally have a seat, and they start off from very crouched position, and thus many animals probably have large joint moments which give them a weaker strength-to-weight ratio. They also have diverse sizes, morphology, ecology and so on…

Terrestrial vertebrates—including humans—often sit to rest and stand to move around. While we've studied how humans stand up extensively, surprisingly little research exists on how other animals transition from sitting to standing.