David F. Wiley, Nina Amenta, Dan A. Alcantara, Deboshmita Ghosh,
Yong J Kil, Eric Delson, Will Harcourt-Smith, F. James Rohlf,
Katherine St. John, Bernd Hamann, Ryosuke Motani, Steven Frost,
Alfred L. Rosenberger, Lissa Tallman, Todd Disotell, and Rob
O'Neill We propose to develop software tools for the analysis,
interpretation and visualization of three-dimensional shape data
from living and extinct organisms, using the statistical
framework of geometric morphometics. While this software will be
widely useful in biology and paleontology, we plan to focus our
work by concentrating on one significant problem: incorporating
fossils into evolutionary trees. Evolutionary trees for groups
of living species are usually estimated using DNA sequence data.
Since this is usually not available for extinct species, we need
to use morphology (the shapes of fossil and modern specimens) to
decide how the extinct species should be included in a tree
whose framework is based on molecular studies. Specifically, we
plan to esti