Ancestral ontogenies in shape characters

CATALANO, S.; VERA CANDIOTTI, F.; BALDO, D. ; SEGURA, V.

Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires

Congreso; 35th Annual Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society; 2016

Willi Hennig Society

We present a novel phylogeneticapproach to infer ancestral ontogenies of shape characters described aslandmark configurations. The method is rooted in the theoretical developmentspreviously published to analyze landmark data in phylogenetics (Catalano et al.2010), using the sum of landmarks displacements not only to define ancestralshapes but also to define the optimal interspecific alignments amongontogenetic trajectories. Evolutionary changes along the tree representmodification of pairings between ontogenetic trajectories and changes inlandmark positions within stages. The method is implemented in a C languageprogram. Data is read from a tps format file and produces a TNT formatfile as output that includes the optimal alignment for each stage ?as adifferent character block- and a labeled tree showing the inferredheterochronic changes. The approach is illustrated with two empirical examples inanurans and felids.