ArticleBMC biology2020
Machine-learning strategies for testing patterns of morphological variation in small samples: sexual dimorphism in gray wolf (Canis lupus) crania.
Article in BMC biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Mandibular Shape Variation, Allometry and Modularity in Adult Mesocephalic Dogs (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Wolf cranial morphology tracks population replacement in Fennoscandia.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- A hybrid machine learning model with attention mechanism and multidimensional multivariate feature coding for essential gene prediction.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Male and female contributions to diversity among birdwing butterfly images.Communications biology · 2024Article
- A deep learning approach for morphological feature extraction based on variational auto-encoder: an application to mandible shape.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2023Article
- A human-neutral large carnivore? No patterns in the body mass of gray wolves across a gradient of anthropization.PloS one · 2023Article
- Sexually mediated phenotypic variation within and between sexes as a continuum structured by ecology: The mosaic nature of skeletal variation across body regions in Threespine stickleback (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Morphology-Based Identification of Bemisia tabaci Cryptic Species Puparia via Embedded Group-Contrast Convolution Neural Network Analysis.Systematic biology · 2022Article
- What you sample is what you get: ecomorphological variation in Trithemis (Odonata, Libellulidae) dragonfly wings reconsidered.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundStudies of mammalian sexual dimorphism have traditionally involved the measurement of selected dimensions of particular skeletal elements and use of single data-analysis procedures. Consequently, such studies have been limited by a variety of both practical and conceptual constraints. To compare and contrast what might be gained from a more exploratory, multifactorial approach to the quantitative assessment of form-variation, images of a small sample of modern Israeli gray wolf (Canis lupus) crania were analyzed via elliptical Fourier analysis of cranial outlines, a Naïve Bayes machine-learning approach to the analysis of these same outline data, and a deep-learning analysis of whole images in which all aspects of these cranial morphologies were represented. The statistical significance and stability of each discriminant result were tested using bootstrap and jackknife procedures.
resultsOur results reveal no evidence for statistically significant sexual size dimorphism, but significant sex-mediated shape dimorphism. These are consistent with the findings of prior wolf sexual dimorphism studies and extend these studies by identifying new aspects of dimorphic variation. Additionally, our results suggest that shape-based sexual dimorphism in the C. lupus cranial complex may be more widespread morphologically than had been appreciated by previous researchers.
conclusionOur results suggest that size and shape dimorphism can be detected in small samples and may be dissociated in mammalian morphologies. This result is particularly noteworthy in that it implies there may be a need to refine allometric hypothesis tests that seek to account for phenotypic sexual dimorphism. The methods we employed in this investigation are fully generalizable and can be applied to a wide range of biological materials and could facilitate the rapid evaluation of a diverse array of morphological/phenomic hypotheses.
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