Modularity is now generally recognized as a fundamental feature of organisms, one that may
have profound consequences for evolution. Modularity has recently become a major focus of …

Morphological modularity arises in complex living beings due to a semi‐independent
inheritance, development, and function of body parts. Modularity helps us to understand the …

Evolutionary innovations are scattered throughout the tree of life, and have allowed the
organisms that possess them to occupy novel adaptive zones. While the impacts of these …

The mammalian cranium (skull without lower jaw) is representative of mammalian diversity
and is thus of particular interest to mammalian biologists across disciplines. One widely …

The number of published studies using geometric morphometrics (GM) for analysing
biological shape has increased steadily since the beginning of the 1990s, covering multiple …

Systematists and evolutionary biologists have widely adopted Procrustes-based geometric
morphometrics for measuring size and shape in biology. Many structures, and in fact most …

Convergent evolution is widely viewed as strong evidence for the influence of natural
selection on the origin of phenotypic design. However, the emerging evo‐devo synthesis …

In recent years, there has been controversy whether multidimensional data such as
geometric morphometric data or information on gene expression can be used for estimating …

Within carnivorans, cats show comparatively little disparity in overall morphology, with
species differing mainly in body size. However, detailed shape analyses of individual …

The key role of the skull in food intake and processing implicates its morphology should be
to some extent adapted to the functional demands present in different diets, while also …