Using morphospaces to understand tafoni development

•Morphospace of tafoni defined•Clustering of tafoni suggest potential developmental paths.•Key factors are rock structure, processes and form geometry.•Relational hierarchy of key factors constrains tafoni development.

Tafoni research has tended to focus on issues around definition and differences rather than trying to develop general concepts for understanding the nature of tafoni. This paper uses the concepts of fitness landscapes and morphospaces to develop a standardized and dimensionless phase space within which to represent, visualize and analyse a dataset of 800 tafoni collected from Antarctica. Within this phase space it is possible to identify clustering of tafoni forms and to illustrate how tafoni development is constrained by a relational hierarchy of rock structure, processes and geometry or form.