Welcome to the Rolian lab website!

Our research aims to understand how morphology evolves. We use the mammal limb skeleton as a model to address three questions: (1) How does limb development evolve to produce  diversity among species? (2) How does covariation in size and shape among limb bones impact their ability to evolve independently? (3) How does limb morphological variation affect locomotor performance across individuals?

We integrate data from multiple levels of biological organization (e.g., genomic, developmental, organismal), to define the mechanisms that have shaped limb ecomorphology in mammals.

Take a look around the website to find out more about our work, and thanks for visiting!

Lab News

August 2018: Our preprint on the genomic and developmental genetic response to selection in the Longshanks mice is up on bioRxiv. This is the result of a great collaboration with Frank Chan at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen and Nick Barton at the Institute of Science and Technology in Vienna, along with trainees and University of Calgary collaborators.

April 2018: Congratulations to lab member Madison Bradley on winning the Mildred Trotter award for best student presentation at the 2018 American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) meeting in Austin! Madi presented some of her work on jumping in the Longshanks mouse. Congrats Madi!