Congratulations to Benton Taylor, recipient of the 2021 Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Naturalists. Read more about Benton Taylor Receives Young Investigator Award

Ancient crocodiles were more diverse than modern crocodiles due to rapid evolution. Modern crocodiles live in river, lakes and wetlands, but ancient crocodiles flourished on land and in the oceans. Some even adopted dolphin-like adaptations to living in oceans, while others lived on land as plant eaters.

Stephanie Pierce, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, co-authored the study in ...

Read more about Rapid evolution made ancient crocodile species more diverse

Congratulations to Javier Ortega-Hernández, recipient of the NSF CAREER Award!

Congratulations to Richard A. Rabideau Childers (Naomi Pierce Lab), he has successfully defended his PhD and is now officially Dr. Childers!

In 2018 researchers from New York University found that little skates, which scuttle along the sea floor on two leg-like fins, use the same motor neurons and genes that help humans and other land vertebrates walk. The study’s findings suggested the neural networks required for walking may have been present in the common ancestor of skates and mammals about 420 million years ago. But how these ancient ancestors walked remained a mystery.

Postdoctoral researcher Fabio Giardina,...

Read more about Mathematical framework unravels the simplicity of early walking in ancient vertebrates