During my childhood, I became obsessed with the idea of digging in fossil sites, using brushes and screwdrivers to uncover fossils that had been there for millions of years. During my bachelor’s degree in Biology at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) I went to my first fossil site and I became addicted to the feeling of finding fossils. Since then I have collaborated with two Cenozoic fossil sites in Madrid, Somosaguas and Batallones, where I became more interested in mammalian evolution, especially in small mammals.

I did a master’s degree in Paleontology and my PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid, in which I used phylogenetic and geometric morphometrics methods to study squirrel diversification and morpho-ecological evolution. One of the primary goals of my research is trying to integrate paleontological and neontological data to understand macroevolutionary patterns of vertebrates. I am currently a Humboldt post-doctoral fellow at the Museum für Naturkunde exploring phenotypic evolution and convergence of rodents using 3D geometric morphometric techniques.

You can find my publications here:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Iris-Menendez

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=duNMJCEAAAAJ&hl=es&oi=ao