CERENA Seminar: All About Ears!

📅 May 13th 2025
🕒 12:30 PM
📍 Room 3.23 – Minas Building, Alameda

We invite you to a seminar with Dr. Romain David, vertebrate palaeontologist and biomechanist at the Natural History Museum in London, who will guide us through the world of the vertebrate inner ear — a structure that holds far more secrets than hearing alone.

Titled "All About Ears", the seminar explores the three parts of the mammalian ear — external, middle, and inner — and how these structures can be used to uncover key biological and evolutionary insights. Dr. David will show how ear anatomy provides information on locomotion, taxonomy, navigation, body size, and even temperature regulation in both living and extinct species.

His research focuses particularly on the biomechanics of the ear that are essential for balance, vision, spatial awareness, and navigation. Through advanced imaging, biomechanical modelling, and statistical approaches, Dr. David reconstructs how extinct animals moved and lived, addressing major evolutionary transitions such as the origin of bipedalism, flight in dinosaurs, and aquatic adaptations in early whales.

Dr. David has held research positions at the Collège de France in Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. His work has been featured in leading journals such as Nature and Science, and exemplifies the intersection of palaeontology, anatomy, and biomechanics.