Anatomical aspects of the nerves of the leg and foot of the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla, Linnaeus, 1758)

Although distal stifle joint nerve distribution has been well established in domestic animals, this approach is scarcely reported in wild animals. Therefore, the aim of this study was to describe the nerves of the leg and foot of Myrmecophaga tridactyla with emphasis on their ramification, distribution, topography and territory of innervation. For this purpose, six adult cadavers fixed and preserved in 10% formalin solution were used. The nerves of the leg and foot of the M. tridactyla were the saphenous nerve (femoral nerve branch), fibular and tibial nerves and lateral sural cutaneous nerve (branches of the sciatic nerve) and caudal sural cutaneous nerve (tibial nerve branch). The saphenous nerve branches to the skin, the craniomedial surface of the leg, the medial surface of the tarsal and metatarsal regions and the dorsomedial surface of the digits I and II (100% of cases), III (50% of cases) and IV (25% of cases). The lateral sural cutaneous nerve innervates the skin of the craniolateral region of the knee and leg. The fibular nerve innervates the flexor and extensor muscles of the tarsal region of the digits and skin of the craniolateral surface of the leg and dorsolateral surface of the foot. The tibial nerve innervates the extensor muscles of the tarsal joint and flexor, adductor and abductor muscles of the digits and the skin of the plantar surface. The caudal sural cutaneous nerve innervates the skin of the caudal surface of the leg. The nerves responsible for the leg and foot innervation were the same as reported in domestic and wild animals, but with some differences, such as the more distal division of the common fibular nerve, the absence of dorsal metatarsal branches of the deep fibular nerve and a greater involvement of the saphenous nerve in the digital innervation with branches to the digits III and IV, in addition to digits I and II

A new integral viscoelastic flow solver in OpenFOAM®

The usual high cost of commercial codes, and some technical limitations, clearly limits the employment of numerical modelling tools in both industry and academia. Consequently, the number of companies that use numerical code is limited and there a lot of effort put on the development and maintenance of in-house academic based codes . Having in mind the potential of using numerical modelling tools as a design aid, of both products and processes, different research teams have been contributing to the development of open source codes/libraries. In this framework, any individual can take advantage of the available code capabilities and/or implement additional features based on his specific needs. These type of codes are usually developed by large communities, which provide improvements and new features in their specific fields of research, thus increasing significantly the code development process. Among others, OpenFOAM® multi-physics computational library, developed by a very large and dynamic community, nowadays comprises several features usually only available in their commercial counterparts; e.g. dynamic meshes, large diversity of complex physical models, parallelization, multiphase models, to name just a few. This computational library is developed in C++ and makes use of most of all language capabilities to facilitate the implementation of new functionalities. Concerning the field of computational rheology, OpenFOAM® solvers were recently developed to deal with the most relevant differential viscoelastic rheological models, and stabilization techniques are currently being verified. This work describes the implementation of a new solver in OpenFOAM® library, able to cope with integral viscoelastic models based on the deformation field method. The implemented solver is verified through the comparison of the predicted results with analytical solutions, results published in the literature and by using the Method of Manufactured Solution