Extinction and Morphospace Occupation: A Critical Review

Abstract

Processes of extinction, especially selectivity, can be studied using the distribution of species in morphospace. Random extinction reduces the number of species but has little effect on the range of morphologies or ecological roles in a fauna or flora. In contrast, selective extinction culls species based on their functional relationship to the altered environment and, therefore, to their position within a morphospace. Analysis of the distribution of extinctions within morphospaces can thus help understand whether the drivers of the extinction are linked to functional traits. Current approaches include measuring changes in disparity, mean morphology, or evenness between pre-and post-extinction morphologies. Not all measurements are straightforward, however, because morphospaces may be non-metric or non-linear in ways that can mislead interpretation. Dimension-reduction techniques like principal component analysis – commonly used with highly multivariate geometric morphometric data sets – have properties that can make the center of morphospace falsely appear to be densely populated, can make selective extinctions appear randomly distributed, or can make a group of non-specialized morphologies appear to be extreme outliers. Applying fully multivariate metrics and statistical tests will prevent most misinterpretations, as will making explicit functional connections between morphology and the underlying extinction processes.