Do you mean embryology in the sense of “the study of embryonic development across the animal kingdom”? Historically a branch of comparative anatomy, now pulling on genetics and biochemistry more and more? Evo-Devo and morphogenesis? I would have said general biology or zoology.
I am certainly not planning on specialising there, but it is fascinating — I remember being completely blown away at about 14-15 when I first read, in an old book called Borradaile’s Invertebrata, that tetrapods belong to the same clade as
starfish! Deuterostomata, the first pore in the blastula is the anus. Then there’s Garstang’s Hypothesis, which places you, me and everything more familiar than a lancelet in the vertebrates as the descendants of a neotenic tunicate larva (which is bilaterally symmetrical, the echinoderms as adults are radially symmetrical, so radically different).
It’s a terribly old book so I cannot begin to imagine just how much more exciting the up-to-dates are.
Incidentally, one of my favourite scientific adventure stories of the last 100 years, the Antarctic “Winter Journey” of Cherry-Garrard, Wilson and Bowers to Cape Crozier, was motivated by the desire to collect an embryo of the Emperor penguin—per Haeckel’s discredited Recapitulation Hypothesis they hoped it might be markedly reptilian.
For the human fœtus, IVF and reproductive biology (
extremely noble field) the above answer seems worth chasing up — what about these websites?
https://www.careers.nhs.scot/explore-careers/healthcare-science/clinical-scientist-in-embryology/https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/blog/2024/3/15/how-to-become-a-clinical-embryologist-why-an-msc-could-be-the-keyhttps://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/clinical-scientist-embryology