Functional anatomy research involves understanding the meaning of shape variation in biology. The reason for the variation might be function, phylogeny/inheritance, environment, disease or just something that changes shape over time (like during growth or locomotion). The biological object is frequently a bone, but can be soft tissues (like faces, or feet!). Data can be collected from bone collections, or CT scans, photographs or living people. The questions that can be asked using these techniques have relevance to anatomy, biomechanics, development, evolution, forensics, medicine, physical anthropology, and palaeontology.

Examples of two projects that could be done in 2010 are:

1. An examination of variation in quokka crania. Quokkas live on Rottnest Island but also in south west Australia and on some other off-shore islands. We could discover whether there is island dwarfism in quokkas, whether they are subject to Bergmann's rule and how much quokkas from different parts of Rottnest interbreed.

2. The skulls in the Anatomy and Human Biology teaching collection are thought to have all come from South Asia. Data has already been collected on cranial collections from other parts of the world. This honours project could digitise the School,s crania collection and analyse their variation in relation to known samples.