Nick Peoples

Dental innovations, such as complex teeth, change the ways fishes feed by providing new functional advantages in prey capture and processing. My research integrates phylogenetic comparative methods, functional morphology, and ecological to investigate the impact these traits have on the diversification of fishes.

Evolutionary innovations are traits that provide species with new functions or major increases in performance. My research explores multiple innovations in the dental system of fishes to better understand how these traits can shape evolutionary trajectories and ultimately structure the distribution of biodiversity. By studying the evolution of complex teeth across all fishes, I showed that the pace at which innovations evolve can have greater effects on diversification than the innovation itself. I also demonstrated that complex teeth accelerate the evolution of ecological niches because they are functionally versatile and allow fishes to feed at low trophic levels (e.g., herbivory). The emergence of these feeding innovations in multiple lineages can stimulate new opportunities for diversification when combined with periods of environmental change, leading to the progressive acceleration of diversification over time. Overall, my research illustrates the diversity of evolutionary innovations and their macroevolutionary impacts and identifies new ways that these traits can determine evolutionary outcomes.