Nouvelles choses à apprendre et nouvelles façons de penser (New things to learn and new ways of thinking)

This week I enjoyed a visit to Tübingen University in Germany to participate in the “Research in Museums Mini-Symposium.” This great session took place at the Palaeontological Collection at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, where PODARCIS team member Antonio Cordero is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow. Antonio invited me to participate and speak about the Morphology-Performance-Fitness paradigm as put forth by Stevan Arnold in an important 1983 paper, which has become a foundational idea to understanding how variation in morphology affects organismal performance, which then in turn impacts individual fitness. I had discussed this paradigm a bit in one of the first PODARCIS blog posts and Antonio thought bringing these eco-morphological / micro-evolutionary / quantitative genetic ideas to a crowd mostly focused on museum-based work and macroevolutionary questions would be useful. It was great for me to re-think some of these ideas and quite fun to present on some work of mine in a new context as well as some work of collaborators and colleagues.

Title slide from my talk.

I’m grateful to Bryan Juarez, a good friend of mine from grad school at Iowa State and currently a PhD student there in the lab of Dean Adams, for sharing some of the early results of his cool work using measures of bone and muscle morphology to predict jumping performance in frogs. I also talked about some of Fabien’s work on Tiger Snakes, highlighting a very cool paper of his demonstrating a potential cost of developmental plasticity in head and jaw size in this species.

Bryan's introduction slide.

I also discussed some of the results from our recent paper on Podarcis, specifically showing the relationship between blood biochemistry, running performance, and maximal metabolic rates in lizards at low altitudes and in high-altitude hypoxia. And finally, I discussed a paper on the garter snakes of Eagle Lake that emerged from a talk given by Anne Bronikowski (my PhD advisor) at a symposium at the 2017 SICB meeting on a framework to merge the morphology-performance-fitness paradigm with theories of life-history evolution. It was a real treat to present old work, new work, and work of friends in a novel context – and spark some most interesting discussions!

In addition to the challenge and fun of presenting this talk, participating in the symposium was great for a several reasons. It gave me the chance to see some great talks and meet some folks that might be normally outside my circle. For example, Christine Böhmer from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, described how variation in neck bone structure relates to feeding styles and performance in birds (she also had a nice post about the symposium here). Brandon Kilbourne from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin demonstrated macroevolutionary patterns in the evolution of mammal limb morphology. Markus Lambertz from Universität Bonn gave some interesting examples of how data can be collected from museum specimens using both old fashioned techniques (histology) and newer technologies (CT scanning). And Steven Binz from Salisbury University gave a very cool demonstration of augmented reality and how this might be useful for both research and education, giving me some exciting ideas for what I can do in the anatomy classes I’ll be teaching this fall at Ohio Wesleyan University. I was able to have some great discussions with folks that pushed my thinking in new directions and opened up some potentially interesting avenues for exploration. For example, I wonder how lung morphology changes with exposure to high-altitude hypoxia in our wall lizards, and how this might differ if the exposure occurs in embryos or adults. If there are interesting differences, could we measure this in museum specimens from low- and high-elevation populations?

Another big benefit to being here is that this place is cool! I walked into the building and was immediately struck by how much it felt like walking back in time a hundred years to the glory days of natural history collections. On the second day of the symposium, we had a lovely guided tour of the collections, which were as abundant as they were impressive. Of course, I was mostly fixated on the dinosaurs and other early reptiles. They had a couple great Plateosaurus specimens, a Kentrosaurus, a huge Mosasaurus, Plesiosaurs galore (undoubtedly the name of my next band), and many, many Ichthyosaurs (including a couple pregnant females in which you could see the embryo skeletons!). They also have a great collection of Therapsids, early mammal-like reptiles that lived before the time of the dinosaurs (our good friends' sons Felix and Leo, prehistoric-creature experts in their own right, would have just loved this place).

A collage of just a few of the many great specimens. Leo & Felix: bet you can't name them all!

The highlight for me though was undoubtedly the two great specimens of Henodus, a large aquatic reptile that looks a heck of a lot like a turtle, even though it’s a Placodont in a totally different reptile lineage. Evolution is neat-o like that.

It’s experiences like this that serve as a rekindling of my scientific enthusiasm – both because of my awe in seeing these amazing biological specimens and because of the insightful, thought-provoking conversations with cool colleagues. Thanks again to Antonio and Ingmar Werneburg at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and to the Volkswagen Stiftung for their support of this great event.

Symposium attendees outside the museum.