ERC Advanced Grant · 2017
Innovation and opportunity in the evolution of life
The aim is to produce a complete evolutionary tree of tetrapods and use this to explore two core questions in macroevolution: the balance between innovation and external processes in driving the evolution of life; and, identifying the best model for morphological evolution. Biodiversity today is unbalanced, with a small number of highly successful groups, like birds and beetles, and many others of equal antiquity but with far fewer species. Why are those groups so successful – was it chance or do they have some remarkable adaptation(s)? The core of the project is to construct a complete evolutionary tree of all 30,000 living species of tetrapods (amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals) and…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.