About Amandine Gillet
I'm a Marie Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow in Katrina Jones Lab at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the University of Manchester (UK), and in Stephanie Pierce Lab at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (USA). My work focuses on the evolution of the shape and function of the vertebral column in secondarily aquatic mammals such as whales, dolphins, seals, manatees, and otters, by combining morphological data collected in Natural History Museums, experimental biomechanical data, and phylogenetic comparative methods.
Intro Content
Nature Communications
The land-to-water transition led to a repatterning of the mammal backbone in cetaceans
Compared to terrestrial mammals, the vertebral column of whales, dolphins, and porpoises seems more homogeneous in shape but our Nested Regions hypothesis illustrates that the cetacean backbone is still made of numerous regions associated to their fish-like body plan.