What is it about?
I test how the mandible in the Gerbillus nanus (a desert gerbil with a wide geographic range in Asia) varies across its geographic range and especially if it is associated with environmental variation. I find that mandibular shape is highly conserved despite varied environments. However, the minor changes in mandibular morphology are associated with jaw muscle attachments which could indicate minor dietary adaptations.
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Why is it important?
This work shows the usefulness in geometric morphometric methods in capturing minor differences in shape that within a single species which would otherwise go unnoticed if using traditional distance based methods.
Perspectives
In this paper I used a very large environmental dataset to test my predictions consisting of 48 environmental variables--far larger than all my other similar papers. Despite this, I still found limited variation in mandibular morphology, which is similar to a previous study where I found limited shape variation in the crania of this species, which indicates that the skull as a whole is remarkably conserved within this desert gerbil.
Bader H Alhajeri
Kuwait University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Geometric Morphometric Analysis of Geographic Mandibular Variation in the Dwarf Gerbil Gerbillus nanus (Gerbillinae, Rodentia), Journal of Mammalian Evolution, November 2020, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10914-020-09530-9.
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