The role of post-natal ontogeny in the evolution of phenotypic diversity in Podarcis lizards

Understanding the role of the developmental pathways in shaping phenotypic diversity allows appreciating in full the processes influencing and constraining morphological change. Podarcis lizards demonstrate extraordinary morphological variability that likely originated in short evolutionary time. Using geometric morphometrics and a broad suite of statistical tests, we explored the role of developmental mechanisms such as growth rate change, ontogenetic divergence ⁄ convergence ⁄ parallelism as well as morphological expression of heterochronic processes in mediating the formation of their phenotypic diversity during the post-natal ontogeny. We identified hypermorphosis – the prolongation of …