Restless creatures

Locomotion – the act of moving from A to B – is something we often take for granted, but it is undoubtedly one of the most important skills that the biosphere ever ‘learned’ to do: one that has played an absolutely central role in the four-billion-year evolutionary history of life. In this short course we will explore this long figurative and literal journey, looking at several major transitions in how living things move that have proved especially significant to the nature of life on Earth. These include the origin of locomotion itself in ancient bacteria and similar microscopic creatures; the origin of muscle-powered, nerve- (and later, brain-) guided movement in the early animal kingdom; the origin of a worm-like body and the huge variety of locomotory techniques ultimately available to such a creature; the invasion of land and the subsequent refinements to terrestrial locomotion that led to such iconic animals as dinosaurs and antelope; the curiously rare origin of flight; and the one-of-a-kind set of locomotory transitions that enabled the origin of humans. We will finish with a closer look at locomotory adaptation by coming face-to-face with the animals themselves in the University Museum of Zoology. 

Throughout the course we will see how locomotion physically works in the various different environments, learn about the anatomical and functional adaptations that make movement as effective (and, usually, as energetically cheap) as possible, and will find out why the evolutionary pathways to the various movement options often seem to be available to only a select few groups of organisms. Above all, we will discover why locomotion has proved so important for life on Earth, and will come to appreciate how a bit of locomotory know-how is a surprisingly powerful tool for understanding why life is the way it is, and illuminating our own place in the living world.