Phylogenetic conservatism in skulls and evolutionary lability in limbs – morphological evolution across an ancient frog radiation is shaped by diet, locomotion and burrowing

Table 1 Summary statistics for the fit of models of phenotypic evolution in the multivariate shape datasets of Skull and limbs (all four limb bones’ analysed together): maximum likelihood estimate (ln L), sample-size corrected Akaike’s Information Criterion (AICc), and Delta AICc (∆AICc, difference between a model and the model with the lowest AICc)

We tested the fit of the following evolutionary models: BM1 = Brownian Motion (unique rate), BMM = Brownian Motion (multiple rates), EB = Early Burst, and 12 evolutionary models with shifts from one model to another (e.g. BM_EB = shift of a BM to EB process, EB_BM = shift of EB to BM, BM_EBi = BM_EB with independent rates, EB_BMi = EB_BM with independent rates, etc.). Analyses were performed in R using the functions mvBM(), mvOU(), mvEB() and mvSHIFT() from the R package mvMORPH (Clavel et al., [71])

ISSN: 2730-7182