Higher masseter muscle mass in grazing than in browsing ruminants.
Using cranioskeletal measurements, several studies have generated evidence that grazing ruminants have a more pronounced mastication apparatus, in terms of muscle insertion areas and protuberances, than browsing ruminants, with the resulting hypothesis that grazers should have larger, heavier chewing muscles than browsers. However, the only investigation of this so far [Axmacher and Hofmann (J Zool 215:463–473, 1988)] did not find differences between ruminant feeding types in the masseter muscle mass of 22 species. Here, we expand the dataset to 48