Further information
Dr John Hutchinson, Veterinary Basic Sciences, The Royal Veterinary College presents this Department of Bioengineering Seminar.
Abstract: Birds today walk, run and hop bipedally with an unusual crouched limb posture that correlates with their long pelvic limbs, short tail, large wings and cranially-positioned centre of mass. But how did this specialized stance and gait evolve? Dr Hutchinson draws on a wealth of evidence not only from the spectacular fossil record of dinosaurs and early birds, which was only beginning to be illuminated when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, but also anatomy, biomechanics, 3D imaging, and computer modelling/simulation to reconstruct how and when these transformations occurred. In turn, this puts individual dinosaur species such as Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor into their proper evolutionary context and reveals how their specializations evolved.
Biography: Dr Hutchinson is an American biologist who has found a new home in the UK. He received his BS degree in Zoology at the University of Wisconsin in 1993, then his PhD in Integrative Biology at the University of California with Kevin Padian in 2001, and rounded out his training with a two-year National Science Foundation bioinformatics Post Doc at the Biomechanical Engineering Division of Stanford University with Scott Delp. Dr Hutchinson started at the RVC as a Lecturer in Evolutionary Biomechanics in 2003 in the Department of Veterinary Basic Sciences and was promoted to Reader in 2008. His interests are in the evolutionary biomechanics of locomotion, especially in large terrestrial vertebrates. He’s studied birds, extinct dinosaurs and their relatives, elephants, and crocodiles.