Multilevel analysis of integration and disparity in the mammalian skull

Abstract

Biological variation is often considered in a scalable hierarchy, e.g., within the individual, within the populations, above the species level. Morphological integration, the concept of covariation among constituent parts of an organism, is also hierarchical; the degree to which these ‘modules’ covary is a matter of the scale of the study as well as underlying processes driving the covariation. Multilevel analyses of trait covariation are a valuable tool to infer the origins and historical persistence of morphological diversity. Here we investigate concordance in patterns of integration and modularity across three biological levels of variation: within a species, within two genera-level radiations, and among species at the family level. We demonstrate this approach using the skull of mammalian family Leporidae (rabbits and hares), which is morphologically diverse and has a rare-among-mammals functional signal of locomotion adaptation. We tested three alternative hypotheses of modularity; from the most supported we investigated disparity and integration of each module to infer which is most responsible for patterns of cranial variation across these levels, and whether variation is partitioned consistently across levels. We found a common pattern of modularity underlies leporid cranial diversity, though there is inconsistency across levels in each module’s disparity and integration. The face module contributes the most to disparity at all levels, which we propose is facilitating evolutionary diversity in this clade. Therefore, the distinctive facial tilt of leporids is an adaptation to locomotory behavior facilitated by a modular system that allows lineages to respond differently to selection pressures.