What's in a name? Formorphology

To re-christen my website's blog, I figured I'd start by explaining my little brand name: Formorphology.

I feel very lucky that I coined it when I did. It was January 2016, my senior year of college. I don't even remember what precisely motivated it. I think I just wanted something broader than my previous Twitter handle, which included "suchus" because I liked crocodiles. (I still like crocodiles.) But I suppose I anticipated a research career spanning many different organisms, which has in fact come to fruition.

Formorphology started as a Twitter handle and has since taken over my online life. It's my website, my Instagram, my Bluesky, my TikTok, and still my TwXtter handle. It's also my Twitch name, which I really need to get back into, and the name of the YouTube channel I'm sure I'll actually dig into one day...

So let's break Formorphology down, because it's more layered, and even a little sneakier, than it looks.

First, it's a portmanteau! An underrated linguistic art! It starts with part of my last name, Formoso, which calls for a brief "rantgent" (rant + tangent, another portmanteau).

My last name ends in an O. O as in Oscar. For-mo-so. And yet I constantly get "Formosa." Look, I get it. It's effectively the same Portuguese/Spanish word, just feminine instead of masculine, and in 1544 Portuguese sailors gave Taiwan the name Formosa (Ilha Formosa, "beautiful island"), which stuck on maps for centuries. So the feminine version has a bit more presence in the cultural zeitgeist. I guess. But my last name is Formoso. And yes, it does mean beautiful/good-looking. [:smug_emoji_face: /flips hair]

Anyway, so Formorphology opens with my last name. Then, the more obvious half is morphology, which is what I do! Morphology is the study of the physical form and structure of organisms, inside and out. As a paleontologist, I'm also an anatomist, and anatomy is a branch of morphology. As a researcher, I specialize in vertebrate functional morphology: how the form of vertebrate animals relates to what they do. My own lens is locomotion and biomechanics, but functional morphology covers everything bodies do, from feeding and breathing to sensing the world around them.

But wait, there's more! Formorphology also opens with the word form, nearly a synonym of morphology. And "form" is my favorite part, because the diverse forms of life are exactly what drew me to biology and evolution in the first place. I would also bet that it’s what attracts you to life as well.

Why is your favorite animal your favorite animal? Your favorite tree or flower? Does it look cool? Does it do something cool? Both of those come down to form and function. For me, it was also the forms of ancient animals--magnificent shapes and appearances captured only in fossils that simply don't exist anymore--that pulled me into deep time and paleontology. Form is still what draws me to certain evolutionary stories, and morphology is the science I get to dive into for my research. Mild pun intended, as I study animals that swim. More specifically, I study the change in morphology and swimming form and function as animals evolve from land to water. This also elucidates my logo of a terrestrial lizard transforming into an aquatic mosasaur, shown below. I'll write more about this next.

And so, the sneaky part. Formoso itself comes from the Latin formosus, from forma, meaning "shape" or "form." So my last name was literally about form all along. Clearly, what I do was meant to be.

And finally, I am all for morphology.