Developmental origin underlies evolutionary rate variation across the placental skull.

Goswami, Anjali; Noirault, Eve; Coombs, Ellen J; Clavel, Julien; Fabre, Anne-Claire; Halliday, Thomas J D; Churchill, Morgan; Curtis, Abigail; Watanabe, Akinobu; Simmons, Nancy B; Beatty, Brian L; Geisler, Jonathan H; Fox, David L; Felice, Ryan N (2023). Developmental origin underlies evolutionary rate variation across the placental skull. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 378(1880), p. 20220083. Royal Society of London 10.1098/rstb.2022.0083

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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'.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Ecology and Evolution (IEE)
UniBE Contributor:	Fabre, Anne-Claire Odile
Subjects:	500 Science > 570 Life sciences; biology 000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
ISSN:	1471-2970
Publisher:	Royal Society of London
Language:	English
Submitter:	Pubmed Import
Date Deposited:	16 May 2023 09:29
Last Modified:	21 May 2023 02:26
Publisher DOI:	10.1098/rstb.2022.0083
PubMed ID:	37183904
Uncontrolled Keywords:	cranial neural crest development ecology morphometrics skull evolution
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/182596