Abstract

With the advances in genomic methods and data, interbreeding has been inferred to have occurred at several instances during human evolution. But how different can populations and species be and still interbreed? One system that allows to study interbreeding and quantitative nature of traits is the mammalian dentition. We have developed the mammalian dentition as a model system in linking developmental and evolutionary biology research, a field often called ‘evodevo’. The principal interested of the work is to understand how biological shape is made during development and what factors influence the evolution of shape. One focus has been to use computational modeling to model tooth shape development. I will discuss how modeling can help biologist to ‘see’ morphology differently, and to virtually experiment with species that cannot be studied in the laboratory. A special case discussed will be an extreme incident of interbreeding that happened 86 years ago.