Truth be told evo-devo is an old field. However, in the last two decades the power of molecular biology and genomics have given birth to a seemingly new school of evo-devo that is gaining in popularity despite initial skepticism. The goal of evodevo is to take knowledge of developmental mechanisms from model organisms-how things form-and combine with it our knowledge of evolution-what things did form-to understand the diversity present in the world today. Implicit in this is a mutual challenge for developmental biologists, paleontologists and evolutionary biologists to explain and interpret each other's data in order to create new insight. In this spirit, a symposium entitled The Developmental Basis of Evolutionary Change was held at the University of Chicago in October 2001. The goal of the meeting was to focus on four topics current in evo-devo and allow paleontologists and developmental/ molecular biologists to exchange ideas and approaches. These topics were (1) modularity, (2) diversity in early developmental processes, (3) the evolution of the arthropod anteroposterior (AP) axis, and (4) the evolution of the vertebrate limb. The style of this meeting served as a platform for more rigorous investigation into specific topics; allowing for a more synergistic understanding of morphological diversity, as well as a gauge for how much distance still separates these fields.