Allometric Growth and Scaling of Body Form of the Spadenose Shark ().

The versatility of the shark body form is suggested to be one of the key factors underlying their evolutionary success and persistence. Nevertheless, sharks exhibit a huge diversity of body forms and morphological adaptations. More subtly, it is increasingly evident that in many species, morphology varies through ontogeny.

Cautionary tales on the use of proxies to estimate body size and form of extinct animals.

Body size is of fundamental importance to our understanding of extinct organisms. Physiology, ecology and life history are all strongly influenced by body size and shape, which ultimately determine how a species interacts with its environment. Reconstruction of body size and form in extinct animals provides insight into the dynamics underlying community composition and faunal turnover in past ecosystems and broad macroevolutionary trends.

The rise of pelagic sharks and adaptive evolution of pectoral fin morphology during the Cretaceous.

The emergence and subsequent evolution of pectoral fins is a key point in vertebrate evolution, as pectoral fins are dominant control surfaces for locomotion in extant fishes. However, major gaps remain in our understanding of the diversity and evolution of pectoral fins among cartilaginous fishes (Chondrichthyes), a group with an evolutionary history spanning over 400 million years with current selachians (modern sharks) appearing about 200 million years ago. Modern sharks are a charismatic group of vertebrates often thought to be predators roaming the open ocean and coastal areas, but most extant species occupy the seafloor.

The origins and drivers of sexual size dimorphism in sharks.

While sexual size dimorphism (SSD) is abundant in nature, there is huge variation in both the intensity and direction of SSD. SSD results from a combination of sexual selection for large male size, fecundity selection for large female size and ecological selection for either. In most vertebrates, it is variation in the intensity of male-male competition that primarily underlies variation in SSD.

Body forms in sharks (Chondrichthyes: Elasmobranchii) and their functional, ecological, and evolutionary implications.

Sharks are among the oldest vertebrate lineages in which their success has been attributed to their diversity in body shape and locomotor design. In this study, we investigated the diversity of body forms in extant sharks using landmark-based geometric morphometric analyses on nearly all the known (ca. 470) extant sharks.