Benjamin Jentgen

Project title:

How did the limb long bones’ evolution enable the sauropodomorphs to become the biggest terrestrial animals that have ever existed on Earth?

Project summary:

The terrestrial gigantism is a topic still not completely understood. The sauropodomorphs are the best group to study how this gigantism had been faced by their limb long bones as they were the heaviest, longest and tallest animals that ever lived on Earth. There is a real need to know how these long bones’ histology evolved in parallel of gigantism (and ontogeny), to determine their biomechanical limits but also to compare this histology between past and recent terrestrial giants. All these new data are aimed to improve current terrestrial gigantism models and theories.

Keywords:

Petrographical microscope, long bone midshaft core drilling, (micro-)tomographer, Geometric morphometrics, Phylogenetic Comparative Methods, Finite Element Analysis

Supervisors:

Valentin Fischer – EDDyLab (ULg)

Philippe Claeys

Koen Stein