Houssaye Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2016

How Bone Adapts to Heavy Weight? Bone Morphological and Microanatomical Adaptation to the Mechanical Constraints Imposed by Graviportality

Heavy animals, said to be graviportal, are under strong mechanical constraints. Their skeleton, notably their limb bones, show convergent morpho-functional adaptations that surprisingly remain very poorly studied. Understanding the convergent and specific adaptations of bone to weight bearing in taxa with various morphologies, sizes, habitats and locomotor behaviours is essential to understand how bone responds to biomechanical constraints. In palaeontology, it will allow determining how giant fossil animals could move and support their weight. The study of graviportality provides an ideal case-study to analyse form-function relationship in a macro-evolutionary context. GRAVIBONE proposes a…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.