Women in Science: Christine Wall

This week, we dissected chicken wings to see how muscles are arranged to efficiently move the bones and tissues. We saw how the joints get larger or smaller when the muscles shorten, depending which side of the joint the muscle was on. We also saw how bone structure in the chicken wing was similar to the human arm, a property called homology. Did you know, though, that the similarities between any body part can give us information about how closely related some species are?

Dr. Christine Wall studies Evolutionary Morphology of the jaw muscles of primates at Duke University. This means that she looks at muscles, bones, and joints in the jaw and around the mouth of extinct monkey and apes to learn more about what kinds of food these animals likely ate and how one primate may be related to or evolved from another. Dr. Wall went to college at Stanford University in California, then earned advances Master's and Doctorate degrees at SUNY Stony Brook in New York. Now, she does research and teaches classes like Human Anatomy at Duke.

While most research in homology and Functional Morphology is done in primates in order to better understand our own hominid origins, you can study structural similarities in any body part and in any species.

To learn more about Dr. Wall's work, click here.

Learn more about Duke's Lemur Center, here.

Learn about Dr. Vanessa Wood, who lives and works primarily in Africa studying Bonobos, one of the most endangered and least understood great apes here.