Morphological evolution and cranial integration in Phyllostomidae

Abstract

I own a fairly representative data base of bat diversity of family Phyllostomidae: 35 skull measurements are 2696 individuals, covering all subfamilies, representing altogether 58 species and 54 genera. For 48 species there are enough individuals to generate covariance matrices and correlation with confidence, and the 10 remaining species is possible to work directly with the mean of the characters. This basis of morphometric data sufficiently accurate to allow comparative analysis of modularity and the average evolution of phylogenetic characters reach. There are issues in the field of evolutionary biology and quantitative genetics that I want to explore in the coming years, using this database. These issues are related to: (1) the relative role of natural selection and genetic drift in the cranial diversification of the group; (2) the detection of adaptive radiation using the criteria proposed by Schluter (2000); (3) the lines of least evolutionary resistance (Schluter, 1996), evaluating its association with the magnitude (intensity of association between characters) and the pace of evolutionary change; (4) the rates of diversification and expansion of food niches in phyllostomid. I have worked with the R programming language since 2012, and analyzes the data from my doctoral thesis used the R statistical programming environment (R Development Core Team, 2010) and statistical analysis software SYSTAT 11 (SPSS Inc., 2004 ). (AU)