Testing for unequal rates of morphological diversification in the absence of a detailed phylogeny: case study from characiform fishes

This study develops the random phylogenies rate test (RAPRATE), a likelihood method that simulates morphological evolution along randomly generated phylogenies, and uses it to determine whether a considerable difference in morphological diversity between two sister clades of South American fishes should be taken as evidence of differing rates of morphological change or lineage turnover. Despite identical ages of origin, similar species richness, and sympatric geographic distributions, the morphological and ecological diversity of the superfamily Anostomoidea exceeds that of the Curimatoidea. The test shows with 90% confidence (using variance among species as the measure of morphological diversity) or 99% confidence (using volume of occupied morphospace) that the rate of morphological change per unit time in the Anostomoidea likely exceeded that of the Curimatoidea. Variation in the rate of lineage turnover (speciation and extinction rates) is not found to affect greatly the morphologica..., Morphospace SpecimensSpecies, lot numbers and numbers of specimens used to create the morphospace. Institutional abbreviations are as listed at http://www.asih.org/files/codons.pdfEvo_22_Table S1.docRelative WarpsResults of a relative warps analysis done in tpsRelw using the data in http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.20/3. The data in the Excel spreadsheet were used to prepare the morphospace figures that appear in Sidlauskas 2007. The order of taxa in the spreadsheet should match the order of taxa in the TPS file.Sidlauskas 2007 Data.xlsLandmark ConsensusesRaw 2D coordinate positions representing the geometry of anatomical landmarks taken from the skulls of 151 fish species. This is a raw text file. Each entry includes the line LM=21 (indicating that there are 21 landmarks per species), a list of the 21 landmarks (X and Y coordinates), and an ID line that includes the name of the species to which the 21 landmarks _above_ the ID belong.

The file is intended to be analyzed with the tpsRelw...