Investigating the axial underpinnings of mammalian locomotor and ecological diversity

Fundamental changes in locomotion underpin many major ecological transitions in vertebrate evolution. Our understanding of how key innovations in the locomotor system drive animal diversity is largely based on the limbs, while the role of the backbone (key to structural support and locomotion) remains largely unstudied. In this project, we will deliver the first comprehensive analysis of the role the backbone in the functional diversification of mammals by addressing the question: how have evolutionary trade-offs in spinal biomechanics influenced major transitions in locomotor ecology and whole-organism fitness?

Objectives:

OBJ1: Use physics-based robotics simulations of locomotion to determine the mechanical constraints and energetic contribution of the backbone to locomotion.

OBJ2: Determine variation in key morphological traits across a broad diversity of mammals to reconstruct their evolutionary patterns and correlations between morphology and ecology.

OBJ3: Integrate morphological data (OBJ2) with computational robotics models (OBJ1) to examine locomotor optimization for determinants of animal fitness (e.g. energetic costs, maximum performance), and a generate functional adaptive landscape to reconstruct trade-offs associated with major locomotor transitions.

Cutting-edge techniques for measuring complex 3D shapes and new approaches for statistically analysing vertebral columns and our state-of-the-art computer simulations will, by themselves, be highly novel and lead to significant advances. However, we will go further by being the first to integrate our unique anatomical and functional data using the emerging "functional adaptive landscape analysis" approach.

This approach combines morphological data with biomechanical data to empirically test for broad scale patterns and relationships between backbone morphology and whole-organism locomotor 'fitness' and assess ecological diversification in mammals.