The colonisation of freshwater and marine ecosystems by land vertebrates has repeatedly
occurred in amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals over the course of 300 million years …

Aquatic vertebrates display a variety of control surfaces that are used for propulsion,
stabilization, trim and maneuvering. Control surfaces include paired and median fins in …

How fast animals move is critical to understanding their energetic requirements, locomotor
capacity and foraging performance, yet current methods for measuring speed via animal …

The anatomy of large cetaceans has been well documented, mostly through dissection of
dead specimens. However, the difficulty of studying the world's largest animals in their …

The unique engulfment filtration strategy of microphagous rorqual whales has evolved
relatively recently (< 5 Ma) and exploits extreme predator/prey size ratios to overcome the …

The scale dependence of locomotor factors has long been studied in comparative
biomechanics, but remains poorly understood for animals at the upper extremes of body …

Body length is one of the most important factors that influence organismal function and
ecological niche. Although larger animals tend to have a suite of physiological advantages …

Despite their enormous size, whales make their living as voracious predators. To catch their
much smaller, more maneuverable prey, they have developed several unique locomotor …

Convergent evolution is a central concept in evolutionary theory but the underlying
mechanism has been largely debated since On the Origin of Species. Previous hypotheses …

The field of biomimetics attempts to inspire and integrate the morphology and function of
biological organisms into the design of human-made technology. In that organisms have …