Can morphospace shed light on cave bear spatial-temporal variation? Population dynamics of Ursus spelaeus from Romualdova pećina and Vindija, (Croatia)

Localized versus generalist phenotypes in a broadly distributed tropical mammal: how is intraspecific variation distributed across disparate environments?

“…Uncorrected and size-corrected skull shape variation was visually assessed using between-groups PCA (BG-PCA, [46]), which is a modification of the most-commonly-used PCA that takes into account a priori individual grouping by identifying PCs from the variance-covariance matrix of group mean shapes and then projecting all individuals into these components [110]. We chose this approach as it represents a compromise between a PCA, which is a suboptimal analyses for revealing group differentiation, and a Canonical Variate Analysis or Discriminant Analysis, which is prone to over-identify group differences [110]. Specifically, we constructed BG-PCA axes using the ecosystem in which individuals were collected.…”

Cranial variation of the greater horseshoe bat Rhinolophus ferrumequinum (Chiroptera: Rhinolophidae) from the central Balkans

“…Subsequently, we performed MANOVA using reduced number of variables, i.e. the first 20 principal components (PCs) that explained 90.9% of total variance, to examine the potential sensitivity of parametric test to the number of shape variables (Hair et al, 1998;Seetah et al, 2012). Since the results of this MANOVA were very similar to those of previous one, all further analyses were done on Procrustes coordinates.…”

Cranial morphological differences within U. deningeri – U. spelaeus lineage: A double traditional and geometric morphometrics approach

“…Future analyses with 3D information on a larger spatial scale, which include more U. deningeri specimens and numerous localities, would allow for a detailed investigation for taxonomic purposes, the effects of diet and the possible localized adaptive response to specific vegetation (Seetah et al, 2012;van Heteren et al, 2012van Heteren et al, , 2014. These analyses must be combined with traditional morphometric data, and perhaps ancient DNA to estimate the contribution of the genetic divergence to the observed pattern of differences in the population.…”

“…Van Heteren et al (2009 focuses her studies on the diet of the Ursus spelaeus. Seetah et al (2012) used geometric morphometrics on molars to investigate population structure based on morphological variation over space and time. Ghanbari (2013) and Nezami et al (2014) studied the sexual dimorphism of cranial shape in the Iranian Brown Bear.…”