Project overview
The way animals gather food is important for their survival. Feeding structures like jaws, teeth, and beaks come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and ways of working. How well these feeding structures work (their performance) can affect how animals adapt and survive in changing environments. However, scientists don't fully understand how the performance of these structures has evolved over time and how this influences their long-term evolution and ecology. To study this, the researchers will use sea urchins, which have a variety of feeding structures, an excellent fossil record, and a well-documented family tree. This will help to understand how changes in the feeding structures enable animals to adapt and diversify over time. The researchers plan to create a publicly accessible online database of 3D digital scans of all known sea urchins, both living and extinct. The database will also include information on where and when these animals lived, and their environments. The researchers will also use this data to develop educational materials that help teachers understand evolution and teach it effectively. This will be one of the largest 3D databases for any group of animals and will be useful for future studies on evolution, conservation, and education. Despite their known importance, precisely how the evolution of feeding structure morphology is influenced by functional performance, and how performance influences macroevolutionary and macroecological patterns in deep time remains unclear. The researchers will build a comprehensive 3D dataset of echinoid feeding morphologies of all living and fossil genera paired with global occurrences and environmental context to address the following hypotheses: the diversification of echinoid feeding morphology fits a model of adaptive evolution; deep time evolution of feeding structure morphology is regulated by performance; differences in performance explain differential morphological diversification and ecological expansion on geological timescales.
