Origins, Bottlenecks, and Present-Day Diversity

Researchers studying living and fossil marine bivalves are providing new insights into how geographic range relates to the evolution of diversity in families of organisms. The study, supported in part by the Exobiology & Evolutionary Biology element of the NASA Astrobiology Program, focuses on how an organism’s position in a morphospace can affect evolution.

A ‘morphospace’ is a way of representing an organism’s possible form, shape or structure. A morphospace has multiple dimensions, and each axis corresponds to a different character of the organism being studied. A single point on the morphospace represents an individual organism in the population.

The study, “Origins, bottlenecks, and present-day diversity: Patterns of morphospace occupation in marine bivalves,” was published in the journal Evolution.

Source: [Evolution: International Journal of Organic Evolution]