Our NSF grant was funded!

We are excited to continue our work investigating the convergent evolution of dietary ecomorphology in waterfowl! This 5-year project will allow us to expand our current work on the timescale of waterfowl evolution to understand the tempo and mode of diversification in this group. We will also expand our morphometrics dataset to evaluate the skeleton more holistically, while beginning to investigate the link between genotype and phenotype related to adaptations of the skeleton for diving (and other morphotypes), a relatively rare phenotype in birds. Finally, we will combine these datasets with niche modeling to begin investigating what environmental variable(s) may ultimately drive the repeated evolution of ecomorphologies.