ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2021
Testing the occurrence of convergence in the craniomandibular shape evolution of living carnivorans.
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- A web-based tool for rapid and accurate craniometric differentiation of clouded leopard species.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Three-dimensional geometric morphometric analyses of humerus ecomorphology: New perspectives for paleohabitat reconstruction in carnivorans and ungulates.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2025Article
- A Cybertaxonomic Revision of the "Biology · 2024Article
- Multiple modes of inference reveal less phylogenetic signal in marsupial basicranial shape compared with the rest of the cranium.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Dental topographic proxies for ecological characteristics in carnivoran mammals.Journal of anatomy · 2023Article
- Craniodental divergence associated with bite force between hybridizing pine squirrels (Tamiasciurus).PloS one · 2023Article
- Mandible shape variation and feeding biomechanics in minks.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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Abstract
Convergence consists in the independent evolution of similar traits in distantly related species. The mammalian craniomandibular complex constitutes an ideal biological structure to investigate ecomorphological dynamics and the carnivorans, due to their phenotypic variability and ecological flexibility, offer an interesting case study to explore the occurrence of convergent evolution. Here, we applied multiple pattern-based metrics to test the occurrence of convergence in the craniomandibular shape of extant carnivorans. To this aim, we tested for convergence in many dietary groups and analyzed several cases of carnivoran convergence concerning either ecologically equivalent species or ecologically similar species of different body sizes described in the literature. Our results validate the occurrence of convergence in ecologically equivalent species in a few cases (as well as in the case of giant and red pandas), but almost never support the occurrence of convergent evolution in dietary categories of living carnivorans. Therefore, convergent evolution in this clade appears to be a rare phenomenon. This is probably the consequence of a complex interplay of one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships taking place between ecology, biomechanics, and morphology.
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