This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Evolution of Developmental Mechanisms Program in the Division of Integrated Organismal Systems in the Biology Directorate and by the Sedimentary Geology & Paleobiology Program in the Division of Earth Sciences in the Geology Directorate.
All contemporary animal forms, including ourselves, are the result of evolution from prior forms, as demonstrated unequivocally by the fossil record. But observation of fossils cannot inform as to how changes in body plan occurred; that question can only be answered experimentally. This interdisciplinary INSPIRE project capitalizes on a unique opportunity to study the same set of divergent characters from an evolutionary structural vantage point, using fossils; and from a developmental molecular biology vantage point studying processes in living descendants of the fossil lineages. Echinoderms have left a superb fossil record stretching back more than half a billion years because of their easily fossilized skeletons, some aspects of which will be studied with 3-D digital high energy X-ray technology for this project. The developmental processes which generate the specific skeletal structures which have arisen in given branches of echinoderm evolution can now also be accessed experimentally in the laboratory. This project has the unique opportunity of providing an explanation for what actually happened in evolution, in the specific terms of changes in genetically controlled process for building bodily structure. This is among the major, fundamental questions in bioscience. If successful the outcome will indeed transform this area of biology, by demonstrating a new powerful approach to understanding, in which is combined, sophisticated observation of deep time remains, with sophisticated experimental and synthetic exploration of living descendants. The project illustrates the potential power of interdisciplinary marriage between traditionally separate areas. It will require new ways of thought and in the process, joint training and research experiences will be instituted for involved graduate students in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology and in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California. This type of multidisciplinary cross-training will produce a new breed of evolutionary scientists who will pioneer further advances in understanding the mechanisms of evolution.
