Geometric morphometrics: ten years of progress following the ‘revolution’

The analysis of shape is a fundamental part of much biological research. As the field of statistics developed, so have the sophistication of the analysis of these types of data. This lead to multivariate morphometrics in which suites of measurements were analyzed together using canonical variates analysis, principal components analysis, and related methods. In the 1980s, a fundamental change began in the nature of the data gathered and analyzed. This change focused on the coordinates of landmarks and the geometric information about their relative positions. As a by-product of such an approach, results of multivariate analyses could be visualized as configurations of landmarks back in the original space of the organism rather than only as statistical scatter plots. This new approach, called “geometric morphometrics”, had benefits that lead Rohlf and Marcus (1993) to proclaim a “revolution” in morphometrics. In this paper, we briefly update the discussion in that paper and summarize the advances in the ten years since the paper by Rohlf and Marcus. We also speculate on future directions in morphometric analysis.