Understanding the dynamics of how water moves is deceptively simple in concept and endlessly complex in practice. Real-world marine environments are anything but controlled: Weather, seasons and geography change constantly. Yet understanding water movement is a critical aspect in areas of study like marine biology, coastal and environmental science and even policy around how we recover from natural disasters.

Dr. Jiabi Du, assistant professor of marine and coastal environmental science at Texas A&M University at Galveston, is spearheading the comprehension of ocean circulation and dynamics by creating detailed 3D ocean models that simulate how water moves throughout Gulf environments.

For decades, the story of domestication has lived in the face, a softer skull, smaller teeth, floppy ears, a curly tail. The cranium has been the easy text. But what happens further down the skeleton? In the bones that carry weight, absorb impact, and remember how an animal moves, that has been harder to read. A poster presented at Anatomy Connected 2026 in Albuquerque begins to answer that question by drawing on one of the most consequential experiments in modern biology: the Silver Fox study.