A conference by Anick Abourachid. What if birds had much to teach us about how we inhabit the world and innovate?
Descended from dinosaurs, birds display an extraordinary range of behaviors and inhabit nearly every environment on the planet. Yet despite this apparent variety, their bodies remain remarkably similar. How could a single anatomical blueprint give rise to such a multitude of life forms? What explains this remarkable capacity for adaptation? Recent advances in functional morphology are helping us better understand this exceptional evolutionary success. They reveal how, over the course of evolution, birds developed solutions that are efficient, robust, and ingenious for moving, feeding, communicating, and interacting with their environment. Anick Abourachid is a professor of functional morphology at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN). She is a researcher in the Mécanismes adaptatifs et évolution research unit (Mecadev UMR7179), CNRS-MNHN. She studies animal form in relation to animals’ lifestyles and habitats within an evolutionary context. She seeks to understand the morphological adaptations that, over the course of evolution, have enabled vertebrates to harness the physical properties of their environment and inhabit every type of environment on the planet. She collaborates with roboticists to test her hypotheses and develop innovative technological solutions that are robust and energy-efficient.
Source: paris.fr — photo: martin