- Project title
- Exploring modularity in the teleost skull with the relevant collections from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris
- Description of the project
- Teleost fishes represent one of the most diverse groups among the vertebrates (animals with a backbone, including ourselves), with more familiar examples such as the tuna (a pelagiarian) to the charismatic coral reef fishes and the mysterious deep-sea anglerfishes. Describing this diversity and the evolution of this diversity in such an important group has been difficult; one method that has been successfully applied to a range of other vertebrates (tetrapods) involves modularity or the division of a structure (such as the skull) into discrete modules where components of these modules interact more closely with each other than outside the module. In this project, we will use MicroCT and high-dimensional morphometric methods to focus on the skull, which in teleosts is highly kinetic, comprising a large number of bones with a series of mobile elements. The Pelagiaria is an ideal, methodologically tractable teleost group for investigation, with 16 families and 80 genera. Our goal is to investigate modularity in the pelagiarian skulls and evolution in the Pelagiaria. This will test our main hypothesis that shared evolutionary patterns between teleosts and tetrapods are shared as part of vertebrate-wide skull modularity.
Works done by the platform AST-RX