Selected Abstracts from the Literature

Abstract

The avian pelvis serves many important func-tions, including supporting locomotion and con-necting the axial and appendicular (legs) skeletons. To understand how the pelvis evolved, it is important to assess the impact of locomotion on development. The goal of the authors from this study was to assess how different locomotor modes in birds influenced the evolution of pelvic mor-phology. To do so, they performed a 2-dimensional geometric morphometric analysis of bird pelves in dorsal and lateral views from 163 species. They investigated the relationships of the pelvic shape to potential influential factors, including ecology, phylogeny, and allometry. The authors found major shape trends in the pelves across birds based on locomotor categories. Birds adapted for special life histories, such as hind limb–propelled swimming, had unique pelvic structures (eg, elongate ilia) to help streamline swimming and reduce drag. Certain factors (eg, ecologic and allometric) accounted for less variation than was expected. The results of the study demonstrated that there was widespread convergence in pelvic morphology. Genome