Embryos of Living Dinosaurs

Alexander Omar Vargas Milne was born 1977 in Auckland, New Zealand, but has lived most of his life in Santiago, Chile. He studied biology at the University of Chile, where he became interested in evolutionary developmental biology. For his PhD, he decided to study embryos of birds as a key to understand their evolution from dinosaurs. He carried out postdoctoral research at University of Wisconsin and Yale before founding in 2008 the Ontogeny and Phylogeny Lab at the University of Chile. Along with students and collaborators, he has made several contributions on the nascent topic of dinosaur-bird evo-devo. He has also contributed to the re-foundation of vertebrate paleontology in Chile.

Introduction. Why birds are dinosaurs: A primer for non-paleontologists. Complex evolution in wing digits. Controversial ankles with unexpected outcomes. Dinosaurian patterns and evolutionary reversion in the embryonic wrist. Lost and found: Bones in the skull of dinosaurs and birds. Unpalatable confusions (evo-devo of the dino-bird palate). From raft to keel (evo-devo of the dino-bird sternum). Experimental approaches to the dinosaur-bird transition. Evolutionary lessons