The Evolution of the Flamingo’s Smile

Presenter – Christopher Torres Phd, Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Biological Sciences at the University of the Pacific

Christopher Torres, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Biological Sciences at the University of the Pacific, will talk about “The Evolution of the Flamingo’s Smile”. Flamingos are among the most iconic birds on the planet – with their ostentatious coloration and perpetually inverted smile, it’s easy to understand why they are featured in zoos (and front yards) the world over. Flamingos are also among the world’s most highly specialized birds, employing an approach to filter-feeding utterly unlike anything else. As such, flamingos provide an ideal model system for studying what drives the evolution of beak shape, what drives birds to become increasingly specialized at the ever-increasing risk of extinction, and how those shifts in ecology and morphology correspond to shifts in Earth history.

But flamingo evolutionary history remains shrouded in mystery, being marked by enigmatic origins, cryptic fossils, and repeated brushes with extinction. In this talk, Chris will share current understanding of that history, and will tell several tales about how he and his colleagues are seeking to dispel many of those mysteries, including: How, after two centuries of study, it was only relatively recently discovered that grebes are the closest living relatives of flamingos. How the understanding of what came before flamingos and grebes remains poor, despite the existence of a nearly complete fossil documenting that exact moment in evolutionary time. How a lineage of bizarre, prehistoric ‘straight-beaked flamingos’ managed to achieve a near-global distribution… and then vanished from the fossil record.

How the ancestors of modern, ‘curved-beaked flamingos’ nearly met the same fate… before spreading back out across the globe. How California – along with the rest of North America’s West Coast – was covered in flamingos as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago. How baby flamingos undergo one of the most unique post-hatching changes in beak morphology known among birds. And how watching those baby flamingos grow up might provide insights to the earliest stages of flamingo life.