Meeting Abstract
Adaption is a process by which an organism becomes fit for the environment around it. Whenever a species colonizes a new environment, they go through adaptations that lead to changes in their morphology. We focus on lizards, specifically geckoes, anoles and skinks and how their toe pads may have changed as they colonized different parts of the world. The purpose of our study was to study the similarities and differences between lizard toe pad shape and how they may have changed through convergent and divergent evolution. We suspect convergence between distantly related species but it has never been quantified before. Photographs of the underside of gecko, anole, and skink hind feet were taken from live and preserved specimens. These toe pads were then digitized using a process called geometric morphometrics. Digital landmarks were placed on these images to outline the shape of the toes using tpsDig software (Rohlf 2010). We used the R package geomorph to align our data and convevol to test for significant levels of morphological convergence.
