Large morphological transitions underlie exceptional shape diversification in an adaptive radiation
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2024
Authors
Starr, K.
Sherratt, E.
Sanger, T.J.
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Scientific Reports, 2024; 14(1):31884-1-31884-10
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Katherine B. Starr, Emma Sherratt, Thomas J. Sanger
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Adaptive radiations are characterized by an increase in species and/or phenotypic diversity as organisms fill open ecological niches. Often, the putative adaptive radiation has been studied without explicit comparison to the patterns and rates of evolution of closely related clades, leaving open the question whether notable changes in evolutionary process indeed occurred at the origin of the group. Anolis lizards are an oft-used model for investigating the tempo and mode of adaptive radiations. Most of the prior research on the diversification of Anolis morphology has focused on the post-cranium because of its significance towards subdivision of the arboreal habitat. But the remarkable diversity in head shape in anoles that has not been so thoroughly investigated. It remains unknown whether the tempo or mode of head shape diversification changed as anoles diversified. We performed geometric morphometric analysis of skull shape across a sample of 12 Iguanian families (110 species), including anoles. Anolis lizards occupy a unique area and a wider region of morphological space compared to the 11 other families examined. We did not find a difference in the evolutionary rate of head shape diversification between anoles and their relatives. Rather, the extraordinary amount of skull diversity arose through a distinct mode of evolution; anoles moved into novel regions by relatively large morphological transitions across morphological space compared to their relatives. Our results demonstrate that traits not directly tied to the adaptive shift of a lineage into unique ecological spaces may undergo exceptional patterns of change as the clade diversifies.
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Published online: 30 December 2024
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© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.