General Biology Seminar

Understanding the origins of adaptive animal diversity is one of the chief challenges to the modern biological sciences. I aim to reveal precise molecular mechanisms underlying evolutionary processes that generate morphological variation, and to show how particular changes in embryonic development can produce morphological alterations for natural selection to act upon. The principal focus for my studies is on the animal face and head. Cranial diversity in vertebrates, such as reptiles, birds and mammals, is a particularly inviting and challenging research topic as animal heads and faces show many dramatic, unique and adaptive features which reflect their natural history. Most of the facial diversity depends on the shapes and sizes of the bones and cartilages that make up the cranial skeleton. To trace adaptive evolution of the cranial skeleton, we employ a synergistic combination of morphometrics analyses, comparative molecular embryology and functional experimentation. I will describe how our investigations in "model" (laboratory-bred species, such as mice and chicken embryos) and a variety of "non-model" (wild species) animals are helping to uncover mechanisms for both small- and large-scale evolutionary transitions in the vertebrate cranial shapes.