JProf. Dr. Hans Recknagel

Research interests:

My research focuses on how species and their traits evolve over time, and on the environmental and evolutionary drivers that trigger lineage diversification and phenotypic transitions. I am particularly interested in how biodiversity arises and becomes established at the genomic level. To address these questions, I combine ecological, phylogenetic, population genetic, and genomic approaches in a statistical framework to test the generality of evolutionary mechanisms across replicate systems and convergent traits. Much of my work investigates major phenotypic transitions in amphibians and reptiles, such as the evolution of cave-associated traits in the olm (Proteus anguinus), to understand how complex phenotypic changes emerge and are encoded in the genome.