Research Topics

Many extinct organisms appear to be strange forms. Why?

One may imagine that they differed from the extant organisms in modes of life such as behaviour, body construction and the other biological properties.

Functional analysis is one of approaches to understand why they look so.

Adaptation may follow the function of form, whereby organisms explore biological performance under the constraint of their own body organisation.

Based on this concept, members of Shiino lab focus on the form and function of fossil skeletons.

Main target of my lab is bi-valved invertebrate, Brachiopoda, but not bivalves such as clams and mussels. The animal has food-collecting organ, the so called lophophore, and feeds on suspended organic particles from sea water. It seems to be a functional body of filtration.

Because they are immobile and inactive, hydrodynamic advantages in food filtration would be needed.

Fluid analyses, both flow experiments and computational fluid dynamics simulations, reveal how they lived on the sea bottom.

Trilobites are known to be the king of fossils. All of them lived in the sea, and were extinct 250 million years ago, the end of Palaeozoic era. As they look wood louses or pill bugs, almost species were walking on the sea bottom.

On the other hand, some species possessed the swimming ability. This is one of innovations for trilobite evolution. Since 2009, we applied computational fluid dynamics simulation to the swimming trilobites.