At the recent workshop ‘Modern Approaches to Functional Anatomy‘ (organized at the Natural History Museum in London) Professor Robert McNeill Alexander, one of the great pioneers of modern biomechanics gave his plenary lecture on optimization in evolution. He used the Gömböc-like shape of some turtle species to illustrate one of his key ideas, referring to the paper by Domokos and Várkonyi, published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the Royal Society London. (source: Tetrapod Zoology).
Original paper: