ArticleScience advances2023
Diversification of the ruminant skull along an evolutionary line of least resistance.
Article in Science advances, 2023. 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, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- Persistent selection on size explains micro- and macroevolutionary alignments in fly wings.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Body size and cranial shape differentiation in urban and rural house mice (bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Morphometric Characterization of the Domestic Yak Skull (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Evolutionary integration of forelimb and hindlimb proportions within the bat wing membrane inhibits ecological adaptation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Functionally mediated cranial allometry evidenced in a genus of rock-wallabies.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Developmental bias as a cause and consequence of adaptive radiation and divergence.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2024Review
- Developmental origin underlies evolutionary rate variation across the placental skull.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Clarifying how microevolutionary processes scale to macroevolutionary patterns is a fundamental goal in evolutionary biology, but these analyses, requiring comparative datasets of population-level variation, are limited. By analyzing a previously published dataset of 2859 ruminant crania, we find that variation within and between ruminant species is biased by a highly conserved mammalian-wide allometric pattern, CREA (craniofacial evolutionary allometry), where larger species have proportionally longer faces. Species with higher morphological integration and species more biased toward CREA have diverged farther from their ancestors, and Ruminantia as a clade diversified farther than expected in the direction of CREA. Our analyses indicate that CREA acts as an evolutionary "line of least resistance" and facilitates morphological diversification due to its alignment with the browser-grazer continuum. Together, our results demonstrate that constraints at the population level can produce highly directional patterns of phenotypic evolution at the macroevolutionary scale. Further research is needed to explore how CREA has been exploited in other mammalian clades.
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Registered trials
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