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Cornell University
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The Hedrick Lab seeks to better understand the interconnected relationship between morphology, phylogeny, and ecology in order to answer the question:
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How do morphological innovations lead to ecological expansion and the radiation of taxa?
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By studying a wide variety of taxa ranging from sharks, to bats, to rodents, to dinosaurs, we assess the impact of morphological evolution on the great diversity of life, past, present, and future.
News from 2025
January 5, 2025; Hedrick Lab at SICB Atlanta
Andrew Orkney, Will Hooker, Lauren Essner, Caroline Goldstein, and Isha Chauhan all presented their research at SICB 2025 in Atlanta!
January 27, 2025; Stephen Presents His Masters' Work
Stephen presented his work at the Lab of Ornithology to the public to educate folks on the effects of road mortality on salamander populations and recruit volunteers for his fieldwork that will be starting this Spring.
April 29, 2025; Catching Bats in Belize
Brandon was in Belize catching bats at Lamanai collecting flight data with friends from Rice and Brown using a flight tent. It was hot, but the bats were cute!
July 11, 2025; New Paper out on Mammal Body Mass!
A new Hedrick Lab paper, led by former postdoc Priscila Rothier, just came out in BMC Ecology and Evolution. We showed how forelimb shape disparity, locomotor mode diversity, and phylogenetic diversity change across body mass in a large sample of 666 terrestrial mammals. Check it out!
July 12, 2025; Caroline at JMIH
Caroline presented her talk on "A Decade of Red-Backed Salamanders in New York" at JMIH. For this work, Caroline has reexamined salamander plots set up in Ithaca in 2014 right when SPARCnet was just founded. We've discovered a few cool things already including that ~6% of salamanders that were marked in 2014 can still be found today. Some still live under the exact same boards that they were captured under 11 years ago!
