Building powerful brains requires access to high-energy food, making changing diet central to primate evolution. But studying the brains of early primates and how diet shaped them isn’t easy, because brains don’t fossilize. As a result, studies are limited to reconstructing the brains of our earliest ancestors from their living descendants. However, a UTSC vertebrate paleontologist has recently netted federal funding for a project that aims to use new methods to tackle the problem.