The AIRE-LifeSciences Masterclass is pleased to announce its April Masterclass with Pauline Provini, team leader at CRI Paris in the Birdsong group. Dr. Provini is a researcher in evolutionary biology with interests in functional morphology, biomechanics and modeling. She studies the links between body structure and function in vertebrates, and the role of these interactions in evolution. It seeks to understand why an organism has a given shape, and how an animal's shape is determined by its movements and the environment in which it moves.
Her Masterclass will take place on zoom (registration is free but you must register to obtain the link, please write to chiara.fracassi[at]cri-paris.org). this Friday, April 23 at 11am.
Title: From paleontology to bioinspiration, through the functional morphology of birds
SummaryUnderstanding the evolution of animals is a fascinating goal. In this sense, paleontology plays a fundamental role in reconstructing paleo-biodiversity and the evolution of animal forms on Earth. However, as paleontology focuses primarily on the classification of fossil organisms and the study of their interactions with each other and with their environment, it is difficult to reconstruct the way of life of extinct animals from fossil remains alone. One way of solving this problem is to make use of the enormous amount of data that the study of living animals can offer. Indeed, the study of a living animal's actual movements, behavior and the detailed structure of its musculoskeletal system is a powerful means of deducing the behavior and movements that an extinct animal might have had with a similar structure. Here, I will outline my academic background and explain how my passion for fossils and dinosaurs led me to study the functional morphology of living dinosaurs - i.e. birds - and ultimately led me to use birds as a model for bioinspiration.
