First year PhD student Ross Mounce has won a travel bursary to present his research at a prestigious international meeting in Hawaii this week.
Ross is interested in how best to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of life. Delegates at “Hennig” all share this goal, and he will present his paper alongside many world leaders in the field.
Ross explained: “Biologists use data from anatomy and molecules to retrace the course of evolution, but often there is a problem: different molecules and different aspects of anatomy tell different stories.
“One solution is to pool all partitions of the data, but sometimes they pull in such different directions that it is very difficult to reconstruct a tree.”
Ross has implemented new methods for measuring this conflict, focussing on the vertebrates (e.g. fish, reptiles, birds and mammals). Received wisdom holds that the anatomy of the head is a more reliable guide to evolution than the rest of the body. But is this really true?
Ross said: “Over the last five months I’ve used over 5,000 hours of supercomputer time to help produce my results. Surprisingly, there is remarkable agreement between the head and tail signals in the majority of the sixty case studies I’ve investigated.
“This isn’t necessarily what we expected, and contrasts with the picture typically emerging from different molecules. However, it’s excellent news for biologists and palaeontologists trying to unravel evolution from incomplete anatomical material.”
Ross’s research is part of a larger Leverhulme Trust funded project running for the next three years within Matt Wills’ lab in Biology & Biochemistry.
Matt Wills said: “As a group, we are all asking important questions about the nature of evolution at the broadest scale. To see the really big picture, we have to combine data from living organisms with what we know from the geological record.
“This allows us to address many of the key issues: why do some groups go extinct and not others? How does evolution make some of its biggest transitions – fish onto land and dinosaurs into the air?
“And are there overarching trends in the history of life: towards increasing complexity, for example?
“Ross’s work is exciting because it shows that our attempts to answer these questions won’t be derailed by holes in the data.”
The Leverhulme Trust was established in 1925 under the Will of the first Viscount Leverhulme. It is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing funds of some £50 million every year.
For further information about the schemes that The Leverhulme Trust fund visit their website.