Project leaders: Emmanuel Gheerbrant, Sevket Sen

The "Old World" project studies the origin and evolution of the Old World fauna before, during, and after closure of the Tethys. This project emphasizes field work to produce new data on the metazoan fossil record (morphological descriptions, phylogenetic analyses, etc.), especially on continental vertebrate evolution in their paleoenvironmental and paleogeographic context, through stratigraphic, geodynamic, and sedimentological studies. The studied sites cover most of the Old World, including Arabo-African, European, and Indian provinces. A sub-project concerns the peri-Tethysian roots of the Old World fauna. It studies the great continental endemism centers (biodiversity, evolutionary radiations, paleoenvironments) that composed the peri-Tethysian provinces, such as Africa (excluding Madagascar) and India and the faunal relationships that had become established before closure of the Tethys. A second sub-project studies faunal exchanges, extinctions and evolutionary radiations that followed the collision between Africa and Eurasia about 22 Ma and, to a lesser extent, between India and Eurasia.

Project leaders: Guillaume Billet, Jérémie Bardin and Isabelle Rouget

Having robust phylogenies is essential to many studies of evolutionary biology. However, methods and data used for phylogenetic reconstruction are diverse and their results and interpretations may strongly differ. Whereas molecular data are usually favored for studies on extant taxa, morphological data are critical for reconstructing the phylogenetic relationships of many fossil groups. Yet, morphological variation embrace many aspects that may reveal hard to deal with and to model realistically and adequately for phylogenetic analyses: integration/modularity, ontogeny, polymorphism, multivariate and continuous variation, etc. In order to strengthen and improve phylogenetic inferences made for fossil taxa, this project aims at enhancing analyses of these complex aspects of morphological data with the use of statistical and morphometrical toolkits.

This project gathers researchers from the team wishing to improve their analyses of morphological variation with an aim to reconstruct phylogenies. It will allow implementing novel and common solutions to analog problems in various taxonomic groups. It will take advantage of the team’s solid experience in morphological phylogenetics and its very diverse taxonomic expertise.

Responsable : Michel Laurin

Ce second projet vise à développer de nouvelles méthodes de datation paléontologiques de l'apparition des clades. Ces méthodes reposeront sur des données stratigraphiques détaillées sur le registre fossile, ainsi que sur la phylogénie des taxons pertinents. Les méthodes produites seront ensuite utilisées pour mieux dater l'arbre des métazoaires, spécialement celui des mammifères (car notre UMR comporte de nombreux paléomammalogistes), mais également celui d'autres vertébrés, de mollusques et d'arthropodes. Ce projet comporte des développements en biomathématiques et informatique et inclura des datations moléculaires, dans les deux cas par l'intermédiaire de collaborations externes. Il capitalise sur notre expertise déjà établie en phylogénétique fondée sur des caractères phénotypiques (les seuls généralement disponibles pour les taxons éteints depuis longtemps), qui repose sur les données morphologiques que nous produisons par l'intermédiaire de descriptions morphologiques, en partie sur du matériel nouveau que nous collectons.