In my last post, I introduced the concept of a morphospace – the bounded range of possible shape variation that exists for a given trait in either one population of organisms or a trait shared by several related populations of organisms. Morphospaces are crucial to understanding morphological (shape) variation in two important ways: 1) determining how past evolutionary forces have acted to produce a particular morphology, and 2) predicting how current and future evolutionary forces will alter that morphology over time. In this post, I write about studying the first concept in traits that might capture facial shape change in response to climatic variation among macaques. What I found, however, was surprising.

Some of the most interesting questions in evolutionary biology arise from both unexpected diversity and unexpected similarity among organisms. Sometimes organisms are genetically similar, yet display outward characteristics (phenotypes) that can be strikingly different. Other times, organisms display phenotypes that are astonishingly similar despite greater genetic distances.