ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Geometry and dynamics link form, function, and evolution of finch beaks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. 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, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Color patterns as a model for connecting developmental mechanisms to phenotypic evolution.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Dynamical systems of fate and form in development.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Article
- Beak dimensions affect feeding performance within a granivorous songbird species.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Physics of sliding on water explains morphological and behavioural allometry across a wide range of body sizes in water striders (Gerridae).Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The legacy and evolvability of Pere Alberch's ideas.Interface focus · 2024Article
- Morphogens in the evolution of size, shape and patterning.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2024Review
- A new small duckbilled dinosaur (Hadrosauridae: Lambeosaurinae) from Morocco and dinosaur diversity in the late Maastrichtian of North Africa.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Beak morphometry and morphogenesis across avian radiations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- How growth-induced stresses guide shape changes during animal morphogenesis: Mechanisms and implications.Seminars in cell & developmental biologyReview
- Mechanistic constraint and evolutionary history matter for the origin of innovation in animal communication.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Darwin's finches are a classic example of adaptive radiation, exemplified by their adaptive and functional beak morphologies. To quantify their form, we carry out a morphometric analysis of the three-dimensional beak shapes of all of Darwin's finches and find that they can be fit by a transverse parabolic shape with a curvature that increases linearly from the base toward the tip of the beak. The morphological variation of beak orientation, aspect ratios, and curvatures allows us to quantify beak function in terms of the elementary theory of machines, consistent with the dietary variations across finches. Finally, to explain the origin of the evolutionary morphometry and the developmental morphogenesis of the finch beak, we propose an experimentally motivated growth law at the cellular level that simplifies to a variant of curvature-driven flow at the tissue level and captures the range of observed beak shapes in terms of a simple morphospace. Altogether, our study illuminates how a minimal combination of geometry and dynamics allows for functional form to develop and evolve.
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