Fiann Smithwick

Independent researcher

Reconstructing the feeding ecology of fossil fishes can be difficult, but new mechanical approaches enable reasonably reliable inferences by comparison with living forms. Here, the feeding ecology of one of the most iconic and abundant actinopterygians of the Early Jurassic, Dapedium, is explored through detailed anatomical study and functional ana...

Since the discovery of exceptionally preserved theropod dinosaurs with soft tissues in China in the 1990s, there has been much debate about the nature of filamentous structures observed in some specimens. Sinosauropteryx was the first non-avian theropod to be described with these structures, and remains one of the most studied examples. Despite a g...

Countershading is common across a variety of lineages and ecological time. A dark dorsum and lighter ventrum helps to mask the three-dimensional shape of the body by reducing self-shadowing and decreasing conspicuousness, thus helping to avoid detection by predators and prey. The optimal countershading pattern is dictated by the lighting environmen...

Exceptionally preserved fossils are the product of complex interplays of biological and geological processes including burial, autolysis and microbial decay, authigenic mineralization, diagenesis, metamorphism, and finally weathering and exhumation. Determining which tissues are preserved and how biases affect their preservation pathways is importa...

Actinopterygians (ray-finned fishes) successfully passed through four of the big five mass extinction events of the Phanerozoic, but the effects of these crises on the group are poorly understood. Many researchers have assumed that the Permo-Triassic mass extinction (PTME) and end-Triassic extinction (ETE) had little impact on actinopterygians, des...

Colour plays a key role in the ecology of living birds and has undoubtedly been important throughout their evolutionary history. Colour patterns influence all aspects of avian ecology, including interspecific communication such as predator-prey dynamics and intraspecific signalling such as sexual selection. The past decade has seen a revolution in...

An infographic abstract for the article "Characterization of melanosomes involved in the production of non-iridescent structural feather colours and their detection in the fossil record" | June 2019 | Journal of The Royal Society Interface 16(155) | DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2018.0921

Non-iridescent structural colour in avian feathers is produced by coherent light scattering through quasi-ordered nanocavities in the keratin cortex of the barbs. To absorb unscattered light, melanosomes form a basal layer underneath the nanocavities. It has been shown that throughout Aves, melanosome morphology reflects broad categories of melanin...

Some of the most varied colors in the natural world are created by iridescent nanostructures in bird feathers, formed by layers of melanin‐containing melanosomes. The morphology of melanosomes in iridescent feathers is known to vary, but the extent of this diversity, and when it evolved, is unknown. We use scanning electron microscopy to quantify t...

Figure S1. Impact of missing data on the functional morphospace. Figure S2. Mean within‐time bin variance calculated from variable numbers of PC axes. Figure S3. Principal component loadings for the functional PCA analysis. PC1 (68%) accounts for variation in the anterior mechanical advantage (MA), maximum jaw depth and average jaw depth. PC2 (24...