This past January, three Alemseged Lab members were able to attend the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in Seattle, Washington. As members of a paleoanthropology lab in an organismal biology department, they know it’s important to stay up to date on everything happening in the broad fields of vertebrate morphology and biomechanics.

Hannah presented her work on “Covariation in the cortical and trabecular structure of the ape clavicle,” showing that the patterns in each type of bone are linked together.

Austin’s talk, titled “Effect of skeletal torsion on human locomotor biomechanics: Support for hominin locomotor diversity?” illustrated how he combined analysis of 3D skeletal morphology with experimental biomechanics of living people to test hypotheses about locomotor diversity in fossil hominins. The slide above, from his presentation, illustrates the relationship between femoral version and iliac blade orientation of modern humans, which is consistent with that found in Australopithecus and other early hominins.

Laura gave a talk titled “The role of phylogeny in the relationship between hamate morphology and dexterity of haplorhines.” She summarized her work quantifying morphological traits of the hamate bone that have been implicated as functionally important for locomotor behavior or tool use and and her analysis thus far of whether trends in these morphological traits across haplorhine primates are driven by selection or simply the result of stochastic morphological change following lineage divergence. As Laura exhibits here, everyone rated the event an overall success!