All species demonstrate intraspecific anatomical variation. While generalisations such as Bergman's and Allen's rules have attempted to explain the geographic structuring of variation with some success, recent work has demonstrated limited support for these in certain Old World monkeys. This study extends this research to the baboon: a species that is widely distributed across sub-Saharan Afric...

Morphological symmetry and asymmetry in three clonal populations of Micrasterias cells was decomposed using a new geometric morphometric method specifically developed for shape analysis of complex symmetric structures. Micrasterias cells are symmetric relative to two perpendicular axes of symmetry: a left–right axis and a juvenile–adult axis. Shape variation is decomposed into a component of sy...

The shape variation displayed by a class of objects can be represented as a probability density function, allowing us to determine plausible and implausible examples of the class. Given a training set of example shapes we can align them into a common co-ordinate frame and use kernel based density estimation techniques to represent this distribution. Such an estimate is complex and expensive, so...

Any change in shape of a configuration of landmark points in two or three dimensions includes a uniform component, a component that is a wholly linear (affine) transformation. The formulas for estimating this component have been standardized for two-dimensional data but not for three-dimensional data. We suggest estimating the component by way of the complementarity between the uniform componen...

In this thesis, we present the Curvature Variation Measure (CVM) as our informational approach to shape description. We base our algorithm on shape curvature, and extract shape information as the entropic measure of the curvature. We present definitions to estimate curvature for both discrete 2D curves and 3D surfaces and then formulate our theory of shape information from these definitions. Wi...

A dog's craniofacial diversity is the result of continual human intervention in natural selection, a process that began tens of thousands of years ago. To date, we know little of the genetic underpinnings and developmental mechanisms that make dog skulls so morphologically plastic. In this Perspectives, we discuss the origins of dog skull shapes in terms of history and biology and highlight rec...

spotted amber ladybird, hippodamia variegata (goeze, 1777) (coleoptera: coccinellidae) is an important predator of aphids and some other insect pests. since shape and size variation may affect biological characteristics of an insect, multivariate analysis of shape variations in four geographically isolated populations of h. variegata (isfahan, shahrekord, shiraz, yasuj) was performed based on e...