Animal Locomotion

• 1: Physical and biological properties and principles related to animal locomotion


• 2: Muscles and skeletons: the building blocks of animal movement


• 3: Energetics of locomotion


• 4: Movement on land


• 5: Movement in water


• 6: Movement in air


• 7: Jumping, climbing and suspensory locomotion


• 8: Neuromuscular control of movement


• 9: Evolution of locomotion

Andrew Biewener is the Charles P. Lyman Professor of Biology and Director of the Concord Field Station at Harvard University. He is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Experimental Biology and served as an Editorial Board member of Biological Letters. Biewener's laboratory focuses on the biomechanics and neuromuscular control of terrestrial and aerial locomotion of vertebrate animals, with relevance to biorobotics and biomedical engineering. He has published over 155 primary research papers, and trained 18 PhDs and 16 post-doctoral fellows. He teaches courses on Comparative Evolutionary Physiology, Comparative Biomechanics and The Biology of Movement, and has helped to co-author the biology textbook, How Life Works (Macmillan Press, 2016).


Sheila Patek is Associate Professor in Biology at Duke University. Patek's lab focuses on the interface of physics and evolution in organismal systems, especially through the evolution of acoustic mechanisms and fast movements in arthropods. She is a Monitoring Editor at The Journal of Experimental Biology and Associate Editor at the journal Evolution. She has taught courses in Marine Invertebrate Biology, How Organisms Move, Introductory Biology and Animal Physiology. Patek received her A.B. with honors in Biology from Harvard University followed by a Ph.D. in Biology from Duke University. She was then awarded a Miller Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley. She has received several honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the George A. Bartholomew Award for distinguished contributions to comparative physiology, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a NSF CAREER award, and the Brilliant 10 award from Popular Science magazine.

...this edition manages to teach the key principles while also conveying the wonder of animal design. This is a book that should be on the desk of every young graduate student and all faculty in this field as a reference and an inspiration. Daniel Schmitt, Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, The Quarterly Review of Biology