Recent work [ 31, 67, 68] has suggested that extant African apes, and particularly Pan, are too derived to provide informative morphological comparisons when interpreting hominin morphology.
These results highlight the importance of incorporating a broad comparative sample of species, phylogenetic information and time within morphological studies and put into context the use of particular extant species for morphological comparisons when interpreting hominin morphology.
Morphological comparisons reveal numerous traits in bonobos that can be viewed as paedomorphic, or juvenile, relative to chimpanzees.
A research potential of fossil 3D modeling could be its application in morphological comparisons between different taxa.
"Morphological comparisons using cranial measurements of other primates clearly indicated that lesula was within the genus Cercopithecus, and most closely resembled the Owl-faced monkey (C. hamlyni) yet was morphologically distinct," said Fuller.
That is, they tend to be much shorter with regard to numbers of consonants and vowels, a situation that renders morphological comparisons within the phylum difficult.
Morphological comparisons to other anurans were based on CT-scans of extant species also scanned at the University of Florida and fossil specimens housed at the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China (see Supplementary Table 1), as well as published descriptions of extinct anurans.
The first step is to obtain a distance matrix, such as that making up the nucleotide differences table, but one based on a set of morphological comparisons between species or other taxa.
This study analyzed grave-associated ground stone from the southern San Francisco Bay Area and employed use-wear analysis (macroscopic and microscopic) and morphological comparisons to investigate potential distinctions in form, manufacturing effort, use, and association over approximately 6000 years of prehistory.
Morphological comparisons with selected Atlantic forest species reveal that R. rufescens displays a remarkably divergent set of character states, such as a unique molar design with diagonally projected cusps and an extremely reduced first digit of hindfoot with a nail instead of a claw, resembling an additional plantar pad.
(b) Individual PowerPoint presentation that demonstrates understanding of morphological comparisons across the animal phyla .
