The hypothesis of Janis & Carrano (1992) lends itself to a modelling test using evidence for sauropod reproduction and population turnover that has become available since their study (e.g. Erickson, 2005; Sander et al., 2008) and combining it with the body-size-area relationship of Burness et al. (2001).
Because of this latitudinal variation in non-tegminal characters, G. fultoni and G. vernalis were more similar in body size in areas of sympatry than in areas of allopatry.
Indeed, several groups of animals, from mammals to insects, exhibit larger body size in areas with higher precipitation [47] [50].
It is important to emphasize that while patchily disturbed forests positively affected body size, these areas also have high rates of mortality, which could negate any positive population-level effect.
We performed a PCA using the "principal" function in the package "pscyh" ver 1.3.10 [ 81] on body size, head crest area, dorsal fin area, proportion of the dorsal fin area coloured, and the intensity of red of the dorsal fin (∆R/G) on each sex separately, across individuals from all populations.
PCAs generally revealed two independent axes of phenotypic variation, one relating to characteristics of size (PC1: body size, head crest area, dorsal fin area) and another relating to characteristics of colour (PC2/3: percentage area of the dorsal fin coloured and intensity of red of the dorsal fin, ∆R/G; Table 1).
However, in addition to land area (as a proxy for available resources) and BMR, there is a crucial third factor in the maximum body size-land area relationship which was not discussed by Burness et al. (2001).
Percent density is a proportion of the total breast area and is greatly influenced by body size; whereas, dense area is less influenced by body size.
This was independent of patellofemoral synovitis, body size, tibial bone area and other covariates, suggesting IPFP area has an important protective role in knee OA.
A nonrandom relationship between body size and island area, as seen here, is an explicit prediction of selection for optimal body size due to indirect island area effects on resource availability and community composition [4], [16], [17].
