ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2023
Developmental origin underlies evolutionary rate variation across the placental skull.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Role of soft tissue and bone interactions in the developmental integration and modularity of the skull in neural crest-specific gap junction alpha-1 knockout mice.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Article
- Evolutionary Rate Incongruences in Squamates Reveal Contrasting Patterns of Evolutionary Novelties and Innovation.Systematic biology · 2026Article
- Neural crest cell biology shapes lizard skull evolution across evolutionary time scales.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Trophic ecology outweighed intrinsic constraints in shaping skull evolution of carnivorous Permian synapsids.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Computational simulation of cranial soft tissue expansion on the cranium during early postnatal growth in humans.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Structural Equation Modeling Reveals How Allometry Shapes Integration in Avian Cranial Evolution.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Great expectations: altricial developmental strategies are associated with more flexible evolution of limb skeleton proportions in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Developmental and Functional Interactions Structure Patterns of Variational Modularity in the Lunar Wrasse Skull.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Article
- Assessing the application of landmark-free morphometrics to macroevolutionary analyses.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Making sense of vertebrate senses from a neural crest and cranial placode evo-devo perspective.Trends in neurosciences · 2025Review
- The Internal Otic Region of Oromerycids (Artiodactyla, Oromerycidae), Early Camelids (Artiodactyla, Camelidae), and the Vicuña (Artiodactyla, Camelidae), Including Notes on Intraspecific and Subadult Ontogenetic Variation.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- The mammalian skull: development, structure and function.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
14 authors at 9 institutions in 12 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The placental skull has evolved into myriad forms, from longirostrine whales to globular primates, and with a diverse array of appendages from antlers to tusks. This disparity has recently been studied from the perspective of the whole skull, but the skull is composed of numerous elements that have distinct developmental origins and varied functions. Here, we assess the evolution of the skull's major skeletal elements, decomposed into 17 individual regions. Using a high-dimensional morphometric approach for a dataset of 322 living and extinct eutherians (placental mammals and their stem relatives), we quantify patterns of variation and estimate phylogenetic, allometric and ecological signal across the skull. We further compare rates of evolution across ecological categories and ordinal-level clades and reconstruct rates of evolution along lineages and through time to assess whether developmental origin or function discriminate the evolutionary trajectories of individual cranial elements. Our results demonstrate distinct macroevolutionary patterns across cranial elements that reflect the ecological adaptations of major clades. Elements derived from neural crest show the fastest rates of evolution, but ecological signal is equally pronounced in bones derived from neural crest and paraxial mesoderm, suggesting that developmental origin may influence evolutionary tempo, but not capacity for specialisation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The mammalian skull: development, structure and function'.
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