Data from: The utility of cranial ontogeny for phylogenetic inference: a case study in crocodylians using geometric morphometrics

The degree to which the ontogeny of organisms could facilitate our
understanding of phylogenetic relationships has long been a subject of
contention in evolutionary biology. The famed notion that ‘ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny’ has been largely discredited, but there remains
an expectation that closely related organisms undergo similar
morphological transformations throughout ontogeny. To test this
assumption, we used three-dimensional geometric morphometric methods to
characterize the cranial morphology of 10 extant crocodylian species and
construct allometric trajectories that model the post-natal ontogenetic
shape changes. Using time-calibrated molecular and morphological trees, we
employed a suite of comparative phylogenetic methods to assess the extent
of phylogenetic signal in these trajectories. All analyses largely
demonstrated a lack of significant phylogenetic signal, indicating that
ontogenetic shape changes contain little phylogenetic information.
Notably, some Mantel tests yielded marginally significant results when
analysed with the morphological tree, which suggest that the underlying
signal in these trajectories is correlated with similarities in the adult
cranial morphology. However, despite these instances, all other analyses,
including more powerful tests for phylogenetic signal, recovered
statistical and visual evidence against the assumption that similarities
in ontogenetic shape changes are commensurate with phylogenetic
relatedness and thus bring into question the efficacy of using allometric
trajectories for phylogenetic inference.