Evolution of embryonic development across the Preocial-Altricial spectrum in birds

ongoing

The project proposes to make use of modern molecular, microscopic and computational tools to analyze the embryonic development of several species of birds and compare how major differences in embryonic mode and tempo develop and what consequences they have in the morphological diversification of avian clades. I will collect embryonic series of species of several bird families that also represent independent evolutionary transitions in developmental mode and generate a large dataset of embryonic anatomical data to dissect how avian evolutionary patterns relate to developmental mode and tempo, combining tools of comparative anatomy, developmental biology, geometric morphometrics and phylogenetic inference, integrating the study of embryonic development with macroevolutionary analyses. Many recent macroevolutionary studies have highlighted the need for the use of embryonic information, yet these kind of datasets are mostly inexistent. Classical developmental biology has made use of selected species as models, representing sometimes groups of thousands of species, as has been the case of Gallus gallus for birds. Only a few other avian species have been systematically studied and these represent an uneven coverage of the diversity of avian anatomies, ecologies and life histories. The project seeks to collect detailed embryonic information of several previously unstudied avian species, and study them in the context of a series of major evolutionary transformations, in order to bridge the existing gap between developmental biology with macroevolutionary studies. The project will serve as a proof of concept for expanding this kind of new-of-its-kind framework, and will provide large amounts of information that have been classicaly associated with distinct field of biological sciences, merging them into one interdisciplinary approach for studying the relationship between development and evolution.