News

Happy to share that our work on the evoluton of axial complexity in synapsids is out today in Nature Communications! Congratulations to Katrina Jones for spearheading this piece of research which shows that the complex morphology of the mammalian backbone...

Congratulations to the Pierce Lab for a wonderful showing at ICVM Prague 2019! Here's a summary: 1) Stephanie presented the turtle humerus adaptive landscape study in the symposium: Ecology, biomechanics and evolutionary constraints in vertebrate trait...

Stephanie and collaborators published a study that used anatomical network analysis ( AnNA) to investigate the evolution of bony connections from fin-to-limb. The study demonstrated that as limbs evolved the bony connections became simpler (primarily due...

Blake Dickson's fabulous work on turtle humeri adpative landscapes is now out in Evolution! The research aimed to investiage whether or not the shape of humeri reflect functional trade-offs of living and moving in different environemnts. The answer: YES...

Proud to announce that Zach Morris has published the first chapter of his thesis research! Zach quantified skull shape development across all species of living crocodilians - from embryos to adults. He showed that by tinkering with their developmental...

Super excited to announce that Brianna successfully defended her PhD dissertation today! She wowed the department with - yet another - amazing presention on her research which explored evolutionary digit reduction in horses. Congrats Dr. McHorse!!!

We are very honored to have contributed to good friend and colleague Prof. Jennifer Clack's festschrift -- celebrating her ground-breaking career unraveling early tetrapod evolution. Dickson, Blake V. & Pierce, Stephanie E. (2019). How (and why) fins turn...

Back in November, echidna specialist extraordinare Sophie Regnault published the first installment of an NSF funded project on mammal forelimb evolution: Regnault and Pierce (2018). Pectoral girdle and forelimb musculoskeletal function in the echidna...

Massive congratulations to Katrina Jones for publishing her three year - big data - study on the evolution of mammalian backbone regionalization in Science! Jones, K. E., K.D. Angielczyk, P.D. Polly, J.J. Head, V. Fernandez, J.K Lungmus, S. Tulga, and S.E...

Pierce lab alumna Abba Parker ('17) has published her amazing undergraduate senior thesis! Along with Brianna McHorse, Abba was able to quantitatively show that extinct horses of North America did not partition habitat based on trait state (e.g. body size...