Coupling shape dynamics to matter gives spacetime

Shape dynamics is a metric theory of pure gravity, equivalent to general relativity, but formulated as a gauge theory of spatial diffeomporphisms and local spatial conformal transformations. In this paper we extend the construction of shape dynamics form pure gravity to gravity-matter systems and find that there is no fundamental obstruction for the coupling of gravity to standard matter. We use the matter gravity system to construct a clock and rod model for shape dynamics which allows us to recover a spacetime interpretation of shape dynamics trajectories.