Conférence Les oiseaux nous inspirent

A lecture by Anick Abourachid. What if birds had a great deal to teach us about our own way of inhabiting the world and innovating?

Descendants of dinosaurs, birds exhibit an extraordinary diversity of behaviours and occupy almost every environment on the planet. Yet, behind this apparent variety, their bodies remain remarkably similar.

How could the same anatomical architecture give rise to such a multiplicity of life forms? How can we explain this formidable capacity for adaptation? Recent advances in functional morphology allow us to better understand this exceptional evolutionary success.

They reveal how, over the course of evolution, birds have developed solutions that are at once streamlined, robust and ingenious for moving around, feeding, communicating or interacting with their environment.

Anick Abourachid is a professor of functional morphology at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN). She is a researcher within the Adaptive Mechanisms and Evolution research unit (Mecadev UMR7179) CNRS-MNHN.

She focuses on the form of animals in relation to their way of life and environment within an evolutionary context.

She seeks to understand the morphological adaptations that, over the course of evolution, have enabled vertebrates to use the physical properties of their environment to inhabit all environments across the planet.

She collaborates with roboticists to validate her hypotheses and propose robust, energy-efficient and innovative technological solutions.