Body mass evolution as a driver of morphological and ecological diversity in terrestrial mammals.

Abstract

Body mass plays a fundamental role in the macroevolutionary dynamics of morphological, ecological, and phylogenetic diversification. Given biomechanical principles, large body masses in terrestrial vertebrates may impose important constraints on the adaptative potential of skeletal morphology. This is especially true for the limbs, which are involved in both supporting and propelling the body during locomotion. We present a novel framework for evaluating how body mass structures patterns of morphological, ecological, and phylogenetic diversification using a dataset of forelimb traits for more than 600 terrestrial mammal species. We found that forelimb shape disparity increases with body mass for mammals generally as well as within mammalian subclades, suggesting that this trend is robust to phylogenetic scale. However, both phylogenetic and locomotor diversity (a proxy for ecological diversity) were high for all except the largest mammals and were not strongly associated with body mass. This suggests that small mammals are capable of speciating widely and evolving novel locomotor modes without requiring drastic changes to forelimb shape. However, as body mass increases, biomechanical constraints require substantial morphological changes to the forelimb to adapt to similar levels of locomotor mode disparity. We also show that different limb bone elements do not respond in the same way to increases in body mass when analyzed individually, perhaps due to differing developmental constraints. We provide new insights on how body mass structures macroevolutionary processes in mammals, and our approach can be generalized to examine this question for a variety of traits, ecological modes, and phylogenetic groups.