Email: alexandra.howard@ag.tamu.edu
Dr. Howard is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Lawing Lab. She now works on phenotypic evolution of sympatric congeners, using spiny lizards (Sceloporus) as a study system. She is working on our NSF grant, “Inferring the impacts of closely-related species on phenotypic evolution.”. She is the current lead programmer on our R package ppgm, now available on CRAN. She also is actively working on help pages and vignettes for ppgm users.
For her PhD she studied the origin of snakes, with particular focus on snakes that specialise in fossoriality (burrowing underground) under supervision of Prof. Jason Head. She received her PhD from the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, and she received a Research Master’s from Imperial College London, and her undergraduate degree from University College London.
Alex is broadly interested in how species adapt to their environments, and how this influences the diversity of life on earth. Alex has presented her work at numerous international conferences including the Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the North American Paleontological Convention, and the International Congress on Vertebrate Morphology.
Publications and Conference Presentations
- Howard, A. F. C., Hurtado-Materon, M. A., Rivera, J.A., Zúñiga-Vega, J. J., Martins, E. P., Lawing, A.M. (2024) The evolution of climate tolerances and the shifting community composition of sympatric congeners of Sceloporus spiny lizards. Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Minneapolis MN USA.
- Howard, A. F. C., Hurtado-Materon, M. A., Rivera, J.A., Zúñiga-Vega, J.J., Martins, E.P., Lawing, A.M. (2024) PaleoPhyloGeographic Models: An R package for integrating paleontological, neontological, and spatial data in a phylogenetic comparative framework. Keynote speaker: Recent Advances in Computational Paleobiology Symposium. North American Paleontological Convention. Ann Arbor, MI USA.
- Howard, A. F. C. (2023) Digging deeper into snake origins: Body size evolution and ecomorphological correlates to fossoriality provide new data on the ecological origin of snakes. J. Vert. Paleo. (suppl.)
- Head, J. J., Howard, A. F.C., and Müller, J. (2022) The First 80 Million Years of Snake Evolution: The Mesozoic fossil record of snakes and its implications for origin hypotheses, biogeography, and mass extinction. Ch 3. pg 26-54 In The Origin and Early Evolutionary History of Snakes. (Ed. Gower, D. J. & Zaher, H.) Cambridge University Press
- Howard, A. F. C., and Head, J. J. (2021) Inferring homoplasy in cranial morphology associated with fossoriality in snakes. J. Vert. Paleo. 41 (suppl.)
- Howard, A. F. C. and Head, J. J. (2019) Alternate phylogenetic positions of fossils affects body size estimates of snake origins. J. Morph. 280: S141