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Nicole Torres Tamayo
2021-11-01
Evolutionary anthropologist Nicole Torres Tamayo visits the KLI
This October, we welcomed KLI visiting fellow Nicole Torres Tamayo to the KLI. Nicole is an evolutionary anthropologist with a background in paleoanthropology and biophysics. She recently completed her PhD on the first 3D quantitative reconstruction of the torso morphology of the Nariokotome fossil at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Madrid, Spain). She is an expert on thoracopelvic morphology in modern humans and extinct hominins.
Her KLI Visiting Fellowship facilitated a collaborative project with resident KLI Fellow and evolutionary anthropologist Nicole Grunstra, expert of bony pelvis and pelvic floor evolution in humans and other mammals. Their joint project seeks to investigate the adaptive covariation between pelvic and thoracic morphology in humans, specifically between the pelvic floor and the abdominopelvic cavity. Underlying this research question is the notion that the human pelvic floor is key in supporting the weight of the abdominopelvic organs and withstanding intra-abdominal pressure, both of which vary across humans of different body sizes. To this end, Torres Tamayo and Grunstra have collected data on 3D surface models of articulated human skeletal torsos, which they are analyzing by means of cutting-edge 3D geometric morphometric methods.
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