Statistical effects on FEA-simulated stress and strain in feeding rodents when teeth are modeled and implanted as separate structures

Background: Finite element analysis (FEA) is used in paleontology to visualize the stress and strain distributions in extinct animals during biting and to make ecological inferences. Most previous work models teeth as physically and materially continuous with the cranium and mandible. When teeth are modeled separately the focus is usually on individual teeth or the mandible. We test the impacts of modeling the teeth as separate structures on the cranium, mandible, and teeth, with the first statistical comparison for mammals of stress and strain results in separate-tooth versus simplified continuous models.