The mouse skull as a source of morphometric data for phylogeny inference

Brownian motion has been a model widely used for describing phenotypic evolution of continuous characters under random drift. Evolution of traits evolving under weak stabilizing selection, together with drift, can also be modeled by the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process, in which a population moves at random on an adaptive peak under the influence of drift with selection returning the population towards the optimum. Obviously, reliability of an evolutionary model stands or falls with the extent to which the underlying assumptions are supported or violated. Another potential problem of continuous characters as a source of data for phylogeny inference is the correlation between them. To assess whether the Brownian motion model or the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model are suitable for modeling the evolution of continuous cranial and dental characters and to what extent these characters are correlated with one another, 11 measurements encompassing various aspects of the mouse skull morphology were collected and subjected to a comparative analysis using the generalized least squares method. It could be shown that only about one-half of the characters evolved according to the Brownian motion model or the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model. Moreover, about 44% of the correlation coefficients exceeded 0.8, suggesting a need for removing at least phenotypic covariances from the data prior to a phylogenetic analysis. Finally, ancestral states of the characters under study were estimated with the generalized least square method. There has been a general trend towards enlarging the overall size of the skull and increasing the braincase volume in the species of the genus Mus.