New paper in Nature Communications about functional trade-offs and phenotypic variation in carnivore skull

Just out in Nature Communications a new open access paper coordinated by Carmelo Fruciano and his former postdoc Gabriele Sansalone, shedding new light on the complex dynamics of morphological and ecological evolution as a consequence of functional trade-offs.

The research, which involved morpho-functional landscape modelling on the cranium of 132 carnivore species, focused on the macroevolutionary effects of the trade-off between bite force and bite velocity. In practice, mammals cannot be “good at everything” and there is a trade-off between how strong and a fast these animals can bite.

The team discovered that rates of evolution in form (morphology) are decoupled from rates of evolution in function (optimization for either force or velocity). Probably the many-to-one mapping of cranium shape on function may prevent the detection of direct relationships between form and function.

Interestingly, they found that theoretical morphologies optimising for velocity are more diverse, while a much smaller phenotypic space is occupied by shapes optimising force. This pattern of differential representation of different functions in theoretical morphological space was highly correlated with patterns of actual morphological disparity.

As comparatively only few morphologies optimise bite force, species optimising this function may be less abundant because they are less likely to evolve rather than because they are “suboptimal”. This type of phenomenon, in turn, may be common and may help explaining why certain clades are less variable than others.

This research was performed largely when Gabriele Sansalone – now an Associate Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia – was a postdoc in the Fruciano Lab and the lab was at IRBIM-CNR Messina. Data acquisition, however, was mainly performed while Gabriele was a postdoc in Steven Wroe’s lab at the University of New England (Australia).