Avineck

The joint congress takes place every six years and brings together four of the world's largest academic societies in the field of evolutionary biology: the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists.
With about 2700 attendees and almost 60 countries represented, "Evolution" will be the largest and most international Evolutionary Biology meeting ever organized so far, showing the dynamism of our field of research.

Avineck postdoc Christine Böhmer presents the latests insights from her and her colleagues' research on the neck of birds.

Poster presentation by Christine:

Böhmer C, Plateau O, Abourachid A and Cornette R (2018).When development meets mechanical forces: new insights into the morphogenesis of the vertebral column in birds. 2nd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Montpellier, France.

See our full list of published conference abstracts.

Christine is also involved in the organisation of the symposium S25. The macroevolutionary dynamics of form-function relationships.

Organizers: Christine Böhmer, Alexandra Houssaye, Brandon Kilbourne, Martha Muñoz, Josef Uyeda.

Macroevolutionary studies applied to comparative and paleontological datasets have revealed much about the dynamics of adaptation across deep time. While such studies commonly examine the evolution of morphology, an important intermediary connecting adaptive landscapes to phenotypic traits is organismal performance. Performance generally more closely relates to organismal fitness and may exhibit very different dynamics than the morphological traits underlying them. Thus, understanding the biomechanics and performance of biological systems can provide key insights into the connections between macroevolutionary models and adaptive landscapes and give greater insights into the functional and ecological implications of major evolutionary transitions. Recent advances in the collection and availability of performance data from comparative and paleontological datasets combined with novel macroevolutionary and biomechanical models are allowing researchers to identify predictable patterns of evolution in response to phylogenetically replicated ecological shifts. By focusing on the relationships between form, function, fossils and phylogeny, this symposium will bring together experts in functional morphology and biomechanical modeling with developers and practitioners of phylogenetic comparative methods--with the goal of cultivating a deeper relationship between macroevolutionary models and biomechanical data and theory.

Invited speaker: Stephanie Pierce “Unravelling the evolution of the mammalian backbone”