Advances in colour and vision

August 2016

ICAL researchers have recently been in the news for their work on the colour of exintct organisms - including birds and dinosaurs - and for discoveries about the nature of eyes from 300 million year old fishes.

Dr Nick Edwards, and Professor Roy Wogelius were recently interviewed for a feature in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, documenting their cutting edge work on using the geochemistry of fossils to build a clearer picture of the colours of long-extinct species.  "Color has roles in lots of different parts of animal behavior and social interactions," says Nick Edwards, which makes this field so exciting - further details of the latest advances are available in the article.

Colours in the living world are contingent on organisms having eyes to see them - something ICAL's Dr Rob Sansom has just published a paper on with colleagues from the University of Leicester. The report, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, documents eyes in fossil jawless fish, suggesting that modern jawless fish such as lampreys and hagfish have evolved from an ancestor with functioning eyes - even when modern species don't themselves have efficient eyes.