EEB Thursday Seminar Series - Pattern and Process in Convergent Evolution: What Can Snakes Tell us about Phenotypic Innovation?

This event is part of our ongoing Thursday Seminar Series.

Preview: The concept of “innovation” - the origin of traits that facilitate transitions to new adaptive zones - underlies most of our understanding of major evolutionary shifts in ecological function. Although snakes have highly simplified body plans, their extraordinary history of repeated phenotypic convergence offers an opportunity for comparative tests of drivers underlying innovation. Using the convergent evolution of 1) defensive mimicry and 2) sensory systems across the global radiation of extant snakes, I will talk about tests of mechanisms that drive transitions to strikingly new and distinct phenotypic landscapes. By combining natural history collections, phylogenetic comparative approaches, CT scanning, and behavioral experiments, our results can challenge traditional ideas about the ecological origins and evolutionary stability of phenotypic innovation.