Meet the scientists!

Mammals come in a crazy variety of shapes and sizes – blue whales, pygmy shrews, moles, platypuses, kangaroos, giraffes, bats, naked mole-rats and of course those weird, mostly hairless and big-headed creatures walking on two legs (known as humans). My job is to work out what has made this diversity possible. Part of my work is to measure mammalian shapes and sizes so I can more easily compare them. As all mammals look the way they do because they happen to grow this way (like people grow into different sizes), I am particularly interested in comparing how different mammal species grow. For example, marsupials (kangaroos, koalas etc.) are born at tiny sizes (some species are born as tiny as a rice grain – the largest babies are the size of a jelly bean). This seems to be the reason that they can’t have as many shapes as other mammals. Crazy, hey?

The day starts with dropping off my baby daughter in childcare and then having a strong coffee at work. After that, the days really vary. Sometimes I spend the whole day on a particular problem (like, how do I interpret my analysis output), or I have a day away from the office to do CT scanning or data collection at the museum. To maximize my productivity, I try to do different things depending on how I feel. For example, making virtual reconstructions of my CT scans in the morning (CT is a method of making animals “transparent” so you can see their bones – a bit like x-ray; see piccie of a 1 cm baby possum CT reconstruction, with white bones and purple “rest of body” ), and doing simpler things during my afternoon low (like data entry). In the later afternoon I meet with colleagues for another coffee and we talk science (or not), and often the last hour of the day is for e-mailing and administrative stuff.

Right now, I work at Jena Uni in which a guy called “Ernst Haeckel” was professor. Haeckel was one of Charles Darwin’s biggest fans (in fact, he was so enthusiastic that Darwin was reportedly scared of him!). Like Darwin in the UK, Haeckel encountered a fair bit of resistance when he tried to teach the idea of evolution. It simply didn’t fit with people’s world view. Strangely enough, this problem is still encountered by many evolutionary biologists, and I think much of this is because people don’t understand the basic concepts of Evolution. I therefore would spend the money on an interactive wall panel for my institute’s museum. On that, the concept of Evolution will be explained and some common issues that people have with the idea will be discussed.