ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Functional constraints during development limit jaw shape evolution in marsupials.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- A perspective from the Mesozoic: Evolutionary changes of the mammalian skull and their influence on feeding efficiency and high-frequency hearing.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Review
- Skull morphology of the extinct Tasmanian tiger suggests unique biting style.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Anatomical description of the jaw muscles and theoretical bite force assessment in South American opossums using manual and digital dissection methods.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Embryology of the fat-tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata): A marsupial model for comparative mammalian developmental and evolutionary biology.Developmental dynamics : an official publication of the American Association of Anatomists · 2025Article
- Ecological drivers of jaw morphological evolution in lepidosaurs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Unexpectedly uneven distribution of functional trade-offs explains cranial morphological diversity in carnivores.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A switch in jaw form-function coupling during the evolution of mammals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- 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
- Shark mandible evolution reveals patterns of trophic and habitat-mediated diversification.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Ornamented species incur higher male mortality in the larval stage.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Mammalian forelimb evolution is driven by uneven proximal-to-distal morphological diversity.eLife · 2023Article
- Functional constraints channel mandible shape ontogenies in rodents.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The origin of placental mammal life histories.Nature · 2022Article
- Article
- Evolutionary modularity, integration and disparity in an accretionary skeleton: analysis of venerid Bivalvia.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Marsupials and Multi-Omics: Establishing New Comparative Models of Neural Crest Patterning and Craniofacial Development.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Article
- Functional constraints during development limit jaw shape evolution in marsupials.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Differences in jaw function experienced through ontogeny can have striking consequences for evolutionary outcomes, as has been suggested for the major clades of mammals. By contrast to placentals, marsupial newborns have an accelerated development of the head and forelimbs, allowing them to crawl to the mother's teats to suckle within just a few weeks of conception. The different functional requirements that marsupial newborns experience in early postnatal development have been hypothesized to have constrained their morphological diversification relative to placentals. Here, we test whether marsupials have a lower ecomorphological diversity and rate of evolution in comparison with placentals, focusing specifically on their jaws. To do so, a geometric morphometric approach was used to characterize jaw shape for 151 living and extinct species of mammals spanning a wide phylogenetic, developmental and functional diversity. Our results demonstrate that jaw shape is significantly influenced by both reproductive mode and diet, with substantial ecomorphological convergence between metatherians and eutherians. However, metatherians have markedly lower disparity and rate of mandible shape evolution than observed for eutherians. Thus, despite their ecomorphological diversity and numerous convergences with eutherians, the evolution of the jaw in metatherians appears to be strongly constrained by their specialized reproductive biology.
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