Although ontogenetic changes in body shape and its associated allometry has been studied for over a century, essentially nothing is known about their underlying genetic and developmental mechanisms. One of the reasons for this ignorance is the unavailability of a conceptual framework to formulate the experimental design for data collection and statistical models for data analyses. We developed ...

The remarkable elongated upper canines of extinct sabretoothed carnivorous mammals have been the subject of considerable speculation on their adaptive function, but the absence of living analogues prevents any direct inference about their evolution. We analysed scaling relationships of the upper canines of 20 sabretoothed feliform carnivores (Nimravidae, Barbourofelidae, Machairodontinae), repr...

BACKGROUND Mammalian juveniles undergo dramatic changes in body conformation during development. As one of the most common companion animals, the time line and trajectory of a dog's development and its body's re-proportioning is of particular scientific interest. Several ontogenetic studies have investigated the skeletal development in dogs, but none has paid heed to the scapula as a critical p...

The consequences of sex-specific selection for patterns of diversification remain poorly known. Because male secondary sexual traits are typically costly to express, and both costs and benefits are likely to depend on ambient environment and individual condition, such traits may be expected to diversify via changes in reaction norms as well as the scaling of trait size with body size (static al...

length-weight relationship and condition factor were investigated in seven fish species, including barbus cyri , capoeta gracilis , alburnoides eichwaldi , acanthalbarnus microlepis , ponticola cyrius , cobitis keyvani and oxynemacheilus bergianus from totkabon river. a total of 570 specimens ranging from 25.90 to 146.97 mm in total length and 0.1 to 260.3 g in total weight were collected. base...

Birds' eyes seem often to be about as large as head size allows and brain size is taken here as a measure of the ill-defined space that is available to accommodate them. In four data sets for non-passerines eye size relates more strongly to brain size than to body mass and most non-passerine data are consistent with eye:brain (or eye:head-space) isometry. Eye:body allometry thus seems to follow...