Juan Benito Moreno

Henslow Fellow 2023-

Juan works at the Department of Earth Sciences and is the Henslow Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College. He is interested in the evolutionary relationships between extant and fossil organisms and how ecological factors - including large-scale geological events such as mass extinctions - affected morphological evolution in deep time.

His research-to-date focuses on reconstructing the origins of the anatomically modern bird body plan combining insights from living bird diversity together with key fossils spanning the dinosaur-to-bird transition. Birds are the most diverse group of living terrestrial vertebrates today, comprising nearly 11,000 living species and inhabiting virtually every subaerial ecosystem. Although the earliest birds arose and diversified during the Mesozoic (the Age of Dinosaurs), the living-bird lineage constitutes the only group of dinosaurs known to have survived through the Cretaceous-Paleogene Mass Extinction 66-million-years-ago. However, the morphological characteristics that made the lineage successful when many other bird-like dinosaurs became extinct are poorly understood. Juan’s doctoral research shed long-sought light on this crucial interval of avian evolution, particularly into the morphology of the ancestral modern-type bird palate, challenging century-old insights into avian evolution.

Juan uses a combination of traditional and cutting-edge techniques, such as comparative anatomy, phylogenetic inference, and high-resolution three-dimensional computed tomography to reconstruct morphological and ecological adaptations across avian evolutionary history. As part of his Fellowship research, Juan is expanding his focus towards the long-overlooked earliest representatives of major living bird lineages that diversified following the End-Cretaceous asteroid impact. This expanded focus is aimed towards producing a new phylogenetic framework for early Cenozoic bird fossils that will allow to test key hypotheses about the ecological filters influencing avian survivorship through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, and how these might have impacted the extraordinarily rapid Cenozoic radiation of the group.

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