The wings of a bird are adapted to the lifestyle they live, meaning that there are as many wing shapes (morphologies) as there are lifestyles (ecologies).  In other words, form follows function, and we can almost predict the behaviour of a bird by the shape of its wings alone.

Propellers are the go-to design for movement through air and water, and wheels for movement across land. At least, for us humans. But propellers and wheels are certainly not, by any means, a popular design for movement through air and water and over land in the natural world. Why is this the case? 

The systems that we design and engineer at Animal Dynamics are inspired by the way nature does things. As a spin-out company from the University of Oxford Zoology Department, our designs have a strong basis in the study of evolutionary biomechanics, a field to which our co-founder Adrian Thomas has dedicated his academic career. That is not to say, however, that our designs are biomimetic, as is so often assumed. In this post, we look at this key difference in our work.

Animal Dynamics design super-efficient systems inspired by the deep study of evolutionary biomechanics.

With our deep roots in biology and nature, we decided to ask our co-founder and Professor of Biomechanics Adrian Thomas a series of weird and wonderful questions, from which animal can go the longest without eating to why octopuses haven’t taken over the world. Find the full series below.