Backed flakes (core edge and pseudo-Levallois points) represent special products of Middle Paleolithic centripetal flaking strategies. Their peculiarities are due to their roles as both a technological objective in the management core convexities retain its geometric properties during reduction. In contexts, these backed implements commonly produced Levallois discoidal reduction sequences. from...

The species Proceratophrys cristiceps belongs to the genus Proceratophrys within the family Cycloramphidae. These amphibians are found exclusively in South America in the morphoclimatic domain of the semi-arid depression zones in northeastern Brazil known as the Caatinga. We examined intrapopulational variation using univariate and multivariate statistics with traditional and geometric morphome...

Cleft lip/palate (CLP) is a relatively common birth defect (about 1 per 1000) so disfiguring that nowadays it is almost always corrected surgically as early as possible. The postnatal surgical correction does not, however, result in a normally growing maxilla (upper jaw), but instead, owing to scar tissue and altered mechanical function, one that grows abnormally. It is of interest to determine...

Morphometrics quantitatively describes the morphological variation of objects.When applied to biological forms, it is a particular field of biometrics. In medical entomology, where a major interest is the biology of insects in their natural environment, morphometrics might be considered as a tool for quantifying the phenotypic variation of an organism. Morphometrics focuses on variation, its pa...

Research using shape data from geometric morphometric (GM) methods in ecology and evolutionary biology is typically comparative, analyzing shapes and shape change over different points along ecological or evolutionary gradients. Whereas standard multivariate statistics procedures are fine for “static” variation – testing for location differences of groups in multivariate data spaces – they are ...

Geometric morphometrics is an approach that has been increasingly applied in studies with insects. A limiting factor of this technique is that some mosquitoes have wings with dark spots or many scales, which jeopardizes the visualization of landmarks for morphometric analysis. Recently, in some studies, chemically treatment (staining) of the wings was used to improve the viewing of landmarks. I...