Thomas Stewart

I employ evolutionary and developmental approaches to ask: how does morphological novelty evolve, and what are the causes of major evolutionary transitions?

This work focuses on vertebrate appendages – fins and limbs – which are powerful models for testing hypotheses of developmental evolution and the relationship between form and function. By integrating paleontological data with experimental embryological and developmental genetic data, my aim is to discover how new body parts evolve and the biological basis of homology.