ii I would like to dedicate my thesis to my Parents, Professors, Relatives and Friends, every single being who have helped me and encouraged at every stage of my life. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful to my academic advisor, Dr. Madhavan Raghavan, who gave me an opportunity to be a part of his wonderful team at BioMOST laboratory, University of Iowa. I really appreciate his help, guidance...

In studies of social inference and human mate preference, a wide but inconsistent array of tools for computing facial masculinity has been devised. Several of these approaches implicitly assumed that the individual expression of sexually dimorphic shape features, which we refer to as maleness, resembles facial shape features perceived as masculine. We outline a morphometric strategy for estimat...

Because of the increasing prenatal use of high-resolution ultrasonography to assess fetal growth and because growth aberration is one of the principal manifestations of abnormal intrauterine development, a more precise definition of normal growth is desirable. Our data set from autopsies of fetuses/neonates (50-4,000 g), collected with systematic attention to precision of measurement, is analyz...

Syphacia muris worm burdens were evaluated in the rat Rattus norvegicus of the strains Wistar (outbred), Low/M and AM/2/Torr (inbred), maintained conventionally in institutional animal houses in Brazil. Morphometrics and illustration data for S. muris recovered from Brazilian laboratory rats are provided for the first time since its proposition in 1935.

The length-weight relationships, condition factor and morphometrics of 10 species of the genus Alburnoides are provided from Iranian inland water. The a values ranged from 0.0037 (Alburnoides damghani) to 0.0128 (Alburnoides namaki), the b values ranged from 2.87 (A. namaki) to 3.50 (A. damghani) and the coefficient of variation (r2) ranged from 0.90 (Alburnoides samii) to 0.99 (A. namaki). Of ...

Frogs are one of the most speciose groups of vertebrate tetrapods (> 6200sp) with a diverse array of locomotor behaviours. Despite the impressive diversity in frog locomotor behaviours, there remains a paucity of information on the relationship between skeletal variation and locomotor mode in frogs and the evolutionary patterns in which these relationships are framed across the frog phylogeny. ...

OBJECTIVE   To describe a protocol for the examination of free-living raptors and report the ophthalmic examination findings of seven raptor species native to central Illinois, namely the barred owl, Cooper's hawk, eastern screech owl, great horned owl, American kestrel, red-tailed hawk, and turkey vulture and to determine if the findings relative to visual prognosis affected eligibility for fu...

LOY, A., S. CATAUDELLA , AND M. CORTI. 1996. Shape changes during growth of the sea bass, Dicentrarchus labrax (Teleostea: Perciformes), in relation to different rearing conditions: An application of thinplate spline regression analysis. Pages 399–408 inAdvances in morphometrics. NATO ASI Series A: Life Sciences, volume 284 (L. F. Marcus, M. Corti, A. Loy, G. Naylor, and D. E. Slice, eds.). Ple...

Competition is one of the most cited mechanisms to explain secondary sexual dimorphism in animals. Nonetheless, it has been proposed that sexual dimorphism in bat wings is also a result of adaptive pressures to compensate additional weight caused by fetus or pup carrying during the reproductive period of females. The main objective of this study is to verify the existence of sexual dimorphism i...

Morphology represents an important tool in descriptive and analytical biology and particularly in palaeontology. Whereas early studies concentrated on qualitative description of morphological characters, there was a transition in the early 20th century leading to analytical approaches with quantitative elements (Thompson 1917; see also Bookstein 1998). This new exploratory focus called morphome...