Causes and consequences of morphological integration in the hyperkinetic snake skull


SOCIETY FOR INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY
2021 VIRTUAL ANNUAL MEETING (VAM)
January 3 – Febuary 28, 2021

Meeting Abstract


52-11  Sat Jan 2  Causes and consequences of morphological integration in the hyperkinetic snake skull Rhoda, DP*; Segall, M; Polly, PD; Raxworthy, C; University of Chicago, Committee on Evolutionary Biology; American Museum of Natural History, Department of Herpetology; Indiana University, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; American Museum of Natural History, Department of Herpetology drhoda6@gmail.com

The highly kinetic skull is a key innovation that allowed snakes to capture, manipulate, and swallow prey exclusively using their heads using the coordinated movement of 8 bones. Despite these unique feeding behaviors, patterns of evolutionary integration and modularity within the feeding bones of snakes in a phylogenetic framework have yet to be addressed. Kinesis in the snake skull may create arbitrary differences in the relative positions of bones, hampering the analysis of modularity using geometric morphometrics methods. Here, we use a high-density geometric morphometric dataset of 60 specimens and develop a new superimposition protocol to address the origin and patterns of integration in the mobile feeding bones of aquatic-foraging snakes. We find that the feeding bones are highly integrated, driven predominantly by functional selective pressures. The most supported pattern of modularity contains four modules each associated with distinct functional roles: the mandible, the palatopterygoid arch, the maxilla, and the suspensorium. Further, the morphological disparity of each bone is not linked to its magnitude of integration, indicating that adequate biomechanical solutions to a wide range of feeding ecologies and behaviors is readily evolvable within the constraint due to integration in the snake feeding system.

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