ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Dietary niche and the evolution of cranial morphology in birds.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
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49 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Fit for purpose? Analysis of the relationship between skull, beak shape and feeding ecology in Psittaciformes.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- New perspectives on head and neck allometry and ecomorphology in tetrapods.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Allometry of Ingestion Among Habitat Mimicking Praying Mantises.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Dietary niche partitioning and convergent gut microbiota in sympatricFrontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Cranial modularity drives phenotypic diversification and adaptive radiation of Antarctic icefishes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Global patterns of colouration complexity in the Paridae: Effects of climate and species characteristics across body regions.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
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- Exploring the Macroevolutionary Signature of Asymmetric Inheritance at Speciation.Systematic biology · 2025Article
- Cranial morphology in flying squirrels: diet, shape, and size disparity across tropical and temperate biomes.Frontiers in zoology · 2025Article
- Morphological diversity in the honeyeater hyolingual apparatus and its relationship with nectarivory.PloS one · 2025Article
- Urbanization-induced simplification of isotopic space in birds from a big Neotropical city.Oecologia · 2024Article
- Complexity and weak integration promote the diversity of reef fish oral jaws.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Anatomical description of neornithine stomach with implications on neornithine stomach morphology.Journal of anatomy · 2024Article
- Cellular, Molecular, and Genetic Mechanisms of Avian Beak Development and Evolution.Annual review of genetics · 2024Review
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- Macroevolutionary drivers of morphological disparity in the avian quadrate.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Four-bar Geometry is Shared among Ecologically DivergentFish Species.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
- Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Cranial morphology in birds is thought to be shaped by adaptive evolution for foraging performance. This understanding of ecomorphological evolution is supported by observations of avian island radiations, such as Darwin's finches, which display rapid evolution of skull shape in response to food resource availability and a strong fit between cranial phenotype and trophic ecology. However, a recent analysis of larger clades has suggested that diet is not necessarily a primary driver of cranial shape and that phylogeny and allometry are more significant factors in skull evolution. We use phenome-scale morphometric data across the breadth of extant bird diversity to test the influence of diet and foraging behaviour in shaping cranial evolution. We demonstrate that these trophic characters are significant but very weak predictors of cranial form at this scale. However, dietary groups exhibit significantly different rates of morphological evolution across multiple cranial regions. Granivores and nectarivores exhibit the highest rates of evolution in the face and cranial vault, whereas terrestrial carnivores evolve the slowest. The basisphenoid, occipital, and jaw joint regions have less extreme differences among dietary groups. These patterns demonstrate that dietary niche shapes the tempo and mode of phenotypic evolution in deep time, despite a weaker than expected form-function relationship across large clades.
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