Paul researches the functional, evolutionary and developmental bases of skeletal morphological variation, especially in primates and reptiles. His aim is to explain how different skeletal morphologies arise during evolution in terms of developmental processes and functional adaptations. The key underpinning technologies are morphometrics, especially geometric morphometric methods, CT imaging, scanning electron microscopy and modelling approaches such as multibody dynamics and finite elements analysis. The advances in morphometrics that have arisen during this work are also being applied in functional studies, imaging and forensics.
Sarah is the convenor of the Mammal Ecology and Environments Group. She is interested in the comparative ecological context of human evolution, Old World monkey palaeobiology and evolutionary history, palaeoecology, functional morphology of the primate postcranial skeleton.
Sam's research goal is to understand the developmental basis of evolutionary differences in morphology between species of primates and other mammals.
Dr Leandro Monteiro
Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology
Leandro studies the variation in shape of biological structures, which is essential for understanding the evolution and development of organisms. Shape variation may be associated with patterns of phenotypic evolution in large scales of time and space, to genetic and environmental factors causing variation within and between populations, and to biotic and abiotic factors in communities. The modern techniques of geometric morphometrics, associated with traditional multivariate statistics, allow for robust studies on shape variation of morphological structures at different levels of spatial morphological scale.