Organisms have evolved a wide range of adaptive behaviors to avoid predation such as escape and hiding, changes in chemical composition, and morphological changes, among others.
Rates of morphological change may vary among lineages, but the amount of time that separates two living lineages from their common ancestor does not.
Second, the rates of morphological change can vary considerably among lineages, with some remaining similar to a common ancestor and/or to more distantly related contemporary lineages and others becoming markedly different over the same time span (Baum et al. 2005).
Morphological changes were among the first reported phenotypes of senescent cells [ 1].
The morphological changes documented among the affected mice illustrate modular and targeted patterns of shape change that are specific to the facial skeleton.
Among those phenotypes, cellular apoptosis and morphological change were observed prior to reduced motility in RNAi-induced double knock-down cells (Fig. 4B and Fig. 5).
Using a recently developed analytical procedure, I also found that the observed morphological evolution within each species was consistent among transects; both in the total amount of morphological change as well as the direction of evolution in the morphological data space.
Within species, the morphological evolution exhibited was concordant among distinct geographic transects, identifying a common pattern of morphological change that implied parallel evolution.
In b, which reflects a pattern of speciation known as "punctuated equilibria," most morphological change occurs in association with speciation events, and the trend is said to be cladogenetic because change occurs primarily among species, not within them.
Morphological change is a primary indication of cell apoptosis.
