Goswami, Anjali;
Noirault, Eve;
Coombs, Ellen J;
Clavel, Julien;
Fabre, Anne-Claire;
Halliday, Thomas JD;
Churchill, Morgan;
... Felice, Ryan N; + view all
(2023)
Developmental origin underlies evolutionary rate variation across the placental skull.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
, 378
(1880)
, Article 20220083. 10.1098/rstb.2022.0083.
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Abstract
The placental skull has evolved into myriad forms, from longirostrine whales to globular primates, and with a diverse array of appendages from antlers to tusks. This disparity has recently been studied from the perspective of the whole skull, but the skull is composed of numerous elements that have distinct developmental origins and varied functions. Here, we assess the evolution of the skull's major skeletal elements, decomposed into 17 individual regions. Using a high-dimensional morphometric approach for a dataset of 322 living and extinct eutherians (placental mammals and their stem relatives), we quantify patterns of variation and estimate phylogenetic, allometric and ecological signal across the skull. We further compare rates of evolution across ecological categories and ordinal-level clades and reconstruct rates of evolution along lineages and through time to assess whether developmental origin or function discriminate the evolutionary trajectories of individual cranial elements. Our results demonstrate distinct macroevolutionary patterns across cranial elements that reflect the ecological adaptations of major clades. Elements derived from neural crest show the fastest rates of evolution, but ecological signal is equally pronounced in bones derived from neural crest and paraxial mesoderm, suggesting that developmental origin may influence evolutionary tempo, but not capacity for specialisation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The mammalian skull: development, structure and function'.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Developmental origin underlies evolutionary rate variation across the placental skull |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1098/rstb.2022.0083 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0083 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | Skull evolution, morphometrics, cranial neural crest, development, ecology |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Cell and Developmental Biology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10172965 |
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