Meeting Abstract
The New World leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae), arguably the most ecologically diverse clade of mammals, have evolved extraordinarily diverse faces and skulls adapted for many different food types, such as insects, fruit, nectar, other vertebrates, and blood. To understand the processes that generated this diversity, we employ a phylogenetically informed geometric morphometric approach analyzing the variability of 3D skull landmarks from developmental and adult data from several lineages. Our results demonstrate widespread peramorphosis in skull morphologies and reveal that their distinctive ecomorphologies are largely achieved through “terminal addition” as the evolutionarily more recent features in cranial morphology emerge later in bat development. Phyllostomids, thus, provide a real-world example of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” with important implications for understanding the evolution of adaptive morphological diversity in vertebrate body form.
