Professor Jennifer A Clack ScD FLS, Professor and Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology, University Museum of Zoology, presents: ‘Structural and functional problems of the fish-tetrapod transition’ as part of the Department of Bioengineering’s Seminar Series.

The transition from living in water to living on land was solved gradually by vertebrates between about 370 and 350 million years ago. For the first time, the vertebrate skeleton had to cope with stresses imposed on it by gravity, and those imposed on it by the needs of feeding on terrestrial prey, by requirements of breathing in air rather than in water, and by those of sensory systems functioning in a very different medium. We can infer some of the changes that were made by simple observation of the fossil forms, but new techniques are providing means to understand them more deeply. The talk will look at some of the answers that have been put forward by conventional means, and then outline some of the new problems that we hope to solve in the future using new techniques.

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