Evolottery
Welcome to the evolutionary lottery of skull and beak morphology
Beak and skull shapes in birds of prey (“raptors”) are strongly coupled and largely controlled by size. Bright, J.A., Marugan-Lobon, J., Cobb, S.N. et al. (1 more author) (2016) The shapes of bird beaks are highly controlled by nondietary factors. PNAS, 113 (19). pp. 5352-5357.
Exercise aims
-
Each participant will fork a GitHub repository, and contribute a file required to simulate the evolutionary trajectory of an imaginary species’ body size.
-
We’ll use GitHub to merge all contributions and plot them together at the end!
-
We’ll also discover the skull and beak shapes associated with each simulated species size.