Geometric Morphometrics Reveal Shape Differences in the Toes of Urban Lizards.

Urbanization, despite its destructive effects on natural habitats, offers species an opportunity to colonize novel niches. Previous research found that urban lizards in Puerto Rico had increased adhesive toepad area and more ventral toepad scales, traits that are likely adaptive and genetically based. We further investigated these phenotypic changes using geometric morphometrics to measure differences in toe shape, toepad shape, and lamellar morphology.

There's more than one way to climb a tree: Limb length and microhabitat use in lizards with toe pads.

Ecomorphology links microhabitat and morphology. By comparing ecomorphological associations across clades, we can investigate the extent to which evolution can produce similar solutions in response to similar challenges. While Anolis lizards represent a well-studied example of repeated convergent evolution, very few studies have investigated the ecomorphology of geckos.

Tempo and mode of performance evolution across multiple independent origins of adhesive toe pads in lizards.

Understanding macroevolutionary dynamics of trait evolution is an important endeavor in evolutionary biology. Ecological opportunity can liberate a trait as it diversifies through trait space, while genetic and selective constraints can limit diversification. While many studies have examined the dynamics of morphological traits, diverse morphological traits may yield the same or similar performance and as performance is often more proximately the target of selection, examining only morphology may give an incomplete understanding of evolutionary dynamics.

Modeling observed animal performance using the Weibull distribution.

To understand how organisms adapt, researchers must link performance and microhabitat. However, measuring performance, especially maximum performance, can sometimes be difficult. Here, we describe an improvement over previous techniques that only consider the largest observed values as maxima.