“I’m thrilled to begin this project, which tackles the amazing 230 million-year fossil record of crocodiles" - Professor John Hutchinson.

Study will explore how crocodile ancestors evolved to adapt to moving in different habitats. 

A research project has received a grant of more than €2.2 million to help improve understanding of how crocodiles have evolved to adapt to moving in different habitats. 

The Royal Veterinary College (RVC) says it will use the funding from the European Research Council (ERC) to learn more about how animals adapt to new environments and the trade-offs involved in these evolutionary changes.

It says that understanding more about these relationships can help explain how significant evolutionary shifts occur, and why some groups of animals have survived over long periods of time. The RVC also hopes the findings can help inform the design of robots that can move on land and in water. 

In the CROCOLOCOEVO project, researchers will analyse biomechanical modelling and simulation combined with experimental data from living crocodiles and robots to characterise links across the anatomy-function-performance spectrum and across habitats.

Considering over 230 million years of evolution, the findings will be used to track locomotor and non-locomotor traits, like feeding, sensory and breathing innovations to reveal how living in similar habitats led to convergent evolution across different species. 

Professor John Hutchinson FRS, Professor of Evolutionary Biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College, said: “I’m thrilled to begin this project, which tackles the amazing 230 million-year fossil record of crocodiles, which are not just “living fossils” but include a huge diversity of strange animals. 

“Despite that wealth of fossil evidence, unlike in dinosaurs we understand little about how movement abilities evolved and were related to the wide variety of environments that crocodiles have lived in.”

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