The latest updates from the Meta-Morphosis Project.
Over the past two days, I was in Dijon CT-scanning European and Asian salamanders from the Specola collection with the invaluable help of Lauriane Poloni at the GISMO imaging platform, University of Bourgogne’s Biogeosciences laboratory. These newly scanned specimens will…
Last week, part of the META-MORPHOSIS team attended the 13th Symposium de Morphométrie et d'Évolution des Formes (SMEF) in Lyon, France. I was truly honored to be invited to deliver the keynote lecture at a meeting that holds a very special place in my scientific journey.
Muscles power the movements that we rely on for everyday life (e.g., walking, running, eating, picking up objects, and many more). But say we were to evolve to live in a different environment or to grow up in a different way, say without passing through puberty or staying as an adolescent all our life...
The “Fourth Elements” was the theme of this year’s Museumnacht. Inspired by this theme, we developed a variety of games for different age groups to introduce the public to salamander diversity, ecology, and conservation.
This blog post summarizes our paper entitled Testing the Impact of Prey Presentation Method on the Feeding Kinematics of Terrestrial and Aquatic Ambystomatidae published in Journal of experimental Zoology – Part A Standardizing prey capture records is a tricky task!…
I co-organized a symposium at the SICB meeting with Ronald Bonett and Molly Womack on The Evolutionary Consequences of Metamorphosis in Metazoans! We ran the event in a hybrid format to ensure participation from speakers facing travel or weather disruptions...
Morgane Fournier and I participated in the Nacht der Forschung event with the University of Bern, where we had the opportunity to present our research projects and discuss our work directly with the public...
From August 17 to 22, 2025, Morgane Fournier, Vivien Louppe, and I attended the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Congress in Barcelona. I was invited to give a talk as part of a symposium on craniofacial evolution organized by…
Morgane Fournier and I recently traveled to Madrid to visit the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, where we acquired an important new collection of Fire Salamander and Alpine Newt samples. Thanks to the invaluable support of Marta Calvo...
In our latest paper, we explore how variation in metamorphosis — the dramatic body transformation that some animals undergo — plays a major role in shaping lower jaw diversity among salamanders and newts. Metamorphosis is a spectacular developmental process, marked…
