ArticleNature ecology & evolution2020
Metamorphosis shapes cranial diversity and rate of evolution in salamanders.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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37 citing papers in PubMed, 100 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Physiology is a hidden dimension of diversity in the radiation of woodland salamanders.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The direct cost of amphibian metamorphosis: insights from body weight loss in facultative paedomorphs.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Neural crest cell biology shapes lizard skull evolution across evolutionary time scales.Evolution letters · 2026Article
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- Exploring Larval Axolotl Brain Development: Insights Into Developmental and Functional Constraints.Evolution & development · 2026Article
- Impact of Life-Cycle Variation on Feeding System Musculature in Caudata.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Structural Equation Modeling Reveals How Allometry Shapes Integration in Avian Cranial Evolution.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Intraspecific Variation in Life Cycle Impacts the Morphology of Alpine Newts.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Topological and variational modularity: A case study using the pectoral girdle across the Chrosomus eos-neogaeus hybridization complex.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Article
- Great expectations: altricial developmental strategies are associated with more flexible evolution of limb skeleton proportions in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Compounding heterochrony shapes the salamander visual system across adaptive zones.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Time to grow up: the PETM climatic event favoured metamorphosing salamanders (Urodela, Salamandridae).Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Evolution of Skull Shape in Boana faber Clade: Unraveling Heterochrony's Influence.Evolution & development · 2025Article
- Trait macroevolution in the presence of covariates.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Applying 3D Models of Giant Salamanders to Explore Form-Function Relationships in Early Digit-Bearing Tetrapods.Integrative and comparative biology · 2024Article
- RRmorph-a new R package to map phenotypic evolutionary rates and patterns on 3D meshes.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Dynamic evolutionary interplay between ontogenetic skull patterning and whole-head integration.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Using salamanders as model taxa to understand vertebrate feeding constraints during the late Devonian water-to-land transition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Detecting natural selection in trait-trait coevolution.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Metamorphosis is widespread across the animal kingdom and induces fundamental changes in the morphology, habitat and resources used by an organism during its lifetime. Metamorphic species are likely to experience more dynamic selective pressures through ontogeny compared with species with single-phase life cycles, which may drive divergent evolutionary dynamics. Here, we reconstruct the cranial evolution of the salamander using geometric morphometric data from 148 species spanning the order's full phylogenetic, developmental and ecological diversity. We demonstrate that life cycle influences cranial shape diversity and rate of evolution. Shifts in the rate of cranial evolution are consistently associated with transitions from biphasic to either direct-developing or paedomorphic life cycle strategies. Direct-developers exhibit the slowest rates of evolution and the lowest disparity, and paedomorphic species the highest. Species undergoing complete metamorphosis (biphasic and direct-developing) exhibit greater cranial modularity (evolutionary independence among regions) than do paedomorphic species, which undergo differential metamorphosis. Biphasic and direct-developing species also display elevated disparity relative to the evolutionary rate for bones associated with feeding, whereas this is not the case for paedomorphic species. Metamorphosis has profoundly influenced salamander cranial evolution, requiring greater autonomy of cranial elements and facilitating the rapid evolution of regions that are remodelled through ontogeny. Rather than compounding functional constraints on variation, metamorphosis seems to have promoted the morphological evolution of salamanders over 180 million years, which may explain the ubiquity of this complex life cycle strategy across disparate organisms.
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