rganism’s evolution, development, and ecology.
Take the case of the tail presented here. Paleontology presents a
number of ancestral milestones in the development of the axial
skeleton and gives a glimpse into the morphology that existed
under the ecological conditions relevant to the time of these early
organisms. To understand the selective pressures that would have
affected the fitness of an extinct organism, we need to know more
about performance advantages inherent to their morphology. We
can turn to similar morphologies of extant organisms, or use tools
like bioinspired robotics and computational models if a good living
analog does not exist