Studying ontogenetic trajectories using resampling methods and landmark data

Abstract

Keywords: ontogeny shape permutation bootstrapping resampling MANCOVA Abstract Comparative studies of ontogenies play a crucial role in the understanding of the processes of mor- phological diversification. These studies have benefited from the appearance of new mathematical and statistical tools, including geometric morphometrics, resampling statistics and general linear models. This paper presents an overview of how resampling methods may be applied to linear models of ontogenetic trajectories of landmark-based geometric morphometric data, to extract in- formation about ontogeny. That information can be used to test hypotheses about the changes (or dierences) in rate, direction, duration and starting point of ontogenetic trajectories that led to the observed patterns of morphological diversification.