Curator/Professor Emeritus
His research: Kevin Padian is interested in how large-scale changes get started in evolution. He and his colleagues work to address questions such as "how did flight evolve?" and "how did dinosaurs walk?"
Why he loves his work: "That it's different every day (I always have new problems to work on). That I can work all over the world. That there are great people in my field from all backgrounds. That we're learning cool stuff all the time. That you're part of a profession with an amazing historical legacy. That you have to know something about a lot of different fields in order to do it properly. And that five-year-olds are as interested in what you do as you are."
Selected Publications
- Manafzadeh, A.R. and K. Padian. 2018. ROM mapping of ligamentous constraints on avian hip mobility: implications for extinct ornithodirans. Proc. R. Soc. B 285: 20180727.
- Padian, K. 2018. Review of Origins of Darwin’s Evolution, by J. David Archibald. Syst. Biol. 67(4):741–742.
- Padian, K. 2018. Review of Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, ambition, and the sin of speculation, by Alistair Sponsel. BioScience.
- Padian, K. 2018. Narrative and “anti-narrative” in science: How scientists tell stories, and don’t. Integrative and Comparative Biology.
- Sigwart, J.D., Bennett, K.D., Edie, S.M., Mander, L., Okamura, B., Padian, K., Wheeler, Q., Winston, J., & Yeung, N. 2018. Measuring Biodiversity and Extinction – Present and Past. Integrative and Comparative Biology.
