Improvements in three-dimensional imaging technologies have renewed interest in the study of functional and ecological morphology. Quantitative approaches to shape analysis are used increasingly to study form-function relationships. These methods are computationally intensive, technically demanding, and time-consuming, which may limit sampling potential. There have been few side-by-side compari...

The field of morphometrics is developing quickly and recent advances allow for geometric techniques to be applied easily to many zoological problems. This article briefly introduces geometric morphometric techniques and then reviews selected areas where those techniques have been applied to questions of general interest. This article is relevant to non-specialists looking for an entry into geom...

The analysis of morphology is crucial to the study of phylogeny in many ancient and modern organismal groups. Recently a number of arguments have been made in favor of regarding certain kinds of morphometric variables as putatively homologous characters and allowing them to participate, along with other non-morphometric variables, in parsimony-based cladistic analyses. These arguments rest on t...

This study estimated the magnitude of sexual dimorphism in a relict sheep from Catalunya (NE Spain), called Fardasca,using geometric morphometric techniques. For these analyses, a total of 18 skull specimens (2 adult males and 16 females) were studied. Our results suggest that the breed is not cranially dimorphic, so sex determination using landmarks described here as criteria is likely to yiel...

this study estimated the magnitude of sexual dimorphism in a relict sheep from catalunya (ne spain), called fardasca,using geometric morphometric techniques. for these analyses, a total of 18 skull specimens (2 adult males and 16 females) were studied. our results suggest that the breed is not cranially dimorphic, so sex determination using landmarks described here as criteria is likely to yiel...

External morphology is commonly used to identify bats as well as to investigate flight and foraging behavior, typically relying on simple length and area measures or ratios. However, geometric morphometrics is increasingly used in the biological sciences to analyse variation in shape and discriminate among species and populations. Here we compare the ability of traditional versus geometric morp...

BACKGROUND Most published attempts to quantify footprint shape are based on a small number of measurements. We applied geometric morphometric methods to study shape variation of the complete footprint outline in a sample of 83 adult women. METHODS The outline of the footprint, including the toes, was represented by a comprehensive set of 85 landmarks and semilandmarks. Shape coordinates were ...