Achievement

Sherwood and colleagues have completed the first study ever to document the morphology of neurons in the cerebral cortex of elephants. These results are important to our understanding of human brain evolution because they demonstrate how the branching structure and connectivity of neurons are modified in a nonhuman mammal of very large brain size. The findings show that there are lineage-specific pathways of neuronal scaling. This research was published in the journal Brain Structure and Function. The Science magazine website covered this research (11/2010).