Information for students at Zürich University and the ETH

Research in our lab aims at integrating developmental biology and palaeontology. Students have the opportunity to both get trained to use a hammer in the field to find and investigate fossils, and also to use a microscope to study living organisms. They can work with fossils but also with embryos of living groups, related to the extinct forms. For example, we collect fossil turtles in the field to study the evolution of the carapace, but also investigate carapace development in extant turtles; and we study the development of limbs in lizards and then compare this to developmental series from the fossil record. We see disparate research (e.g. embryology, palaeontological fieldwork, systematics, or comparative anatomy) on large-scale themes as the best training ground.

If you think you may be interested in doing a Master's thesis in our lab, please contact us. Examples of areas of research for Master's theses are:

• Comparative skeletogenesis in land vertebrates
• Embryogenesis and organogenesis of modern turtles, birds and frogs
• Bone microstructure in living and fossil reptiles
• Evolution of fossil marine reptiles
  Only 0.5 % of about 18000 described living species of reptiles (incl. birds) inhabit the oceans worldwide, including for example sea snakes, marine turtles, or the marine iguana. The perspective changes when the fossil records of each of these groups, as well as lineages that lack modern descendants such as the extremely successful mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and sauropterygian reptiles, are taken into account. To better understand why the modern marine reptile fauna is thus depleted, we try to integrate data of today's reptiles with those of the fossil reptiles. We are studying limb development, and ossification patterns and sequences, in marine reptiles from Triassic sediments from the UNESCO world heritage site of Monte San Giorgio, Switzerland.
• Anatomy and systematics of fossil South American mammals
• Systematics of fossil and living selected mammals clades (e.g. moles)