The Sears Lab harnesses the diversity that exists in mammals to study how evolution works, explore the developmental rules that shape evolution, and provide insights into human health. Our goal is to understand our mammalian past to improve our future.
The work at our lab is expansive, both in terms of the animals we study (we study several species and clades) and the biological scales at which we investigate (e.g., from genes to organisms to clades, and from processes that operate over seconds to processes that operate over millenia).
During their history, bats have evolved wings and powered flight, extremely long lifespans, the ability to tolerate viral infections, and echolocation. They have UV vision, saliva-borne anticoagulants, novel structures, and diverse diets. Bats explosively diversified to fill many ecological niches, and today make up 20% of living mammals. Thus, bats serve as “natural evolutionary experiments” that we can use to study ecological and evolutionary processes and inform human health.
There are lots of traits that make an animal a mammal, including hair on their bodies and producing milk for their young. Most people, in fact, can pick a mammal out of an animal line-up. The problem is, many important mammalian traits do not preserve well in fossils. Thus, to understand the origins and evolution of mammals, including humans, we take a comparative approach in which we investigate processes that are shared and divergent among species.
