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      Patterns of divergence in the morphology of ceratopsian dinosaurs: sympatry is not a driver of ornament evolution

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          Abstract

          Establishing the origin and function of unusual traits in fossil taxa provides a crucial tool in understanding macroevolutionary patterns over long periods of time. Ceratopsian dinosaurs are known for their exaggerated and often elaborate horns and frills, which vary considerably between species. Many explanations have been proposed for the origin and evolution of these ‘ornamental’ traits, from predator defence to socio-sexual dominance signalling and, more recently, species recognition. A key prediction of the species recognition hypothesis is that two or more species possessing divergent ornamental traits should have been at least partially sympatric. For the first time to our knowledge, we test this hypothesis in ceratopsians by conducting a comparison of the morphological characters of 46 species. A total of 350 ceratopsian cladistic characters were categorized as either ‘internal’, ‘display’ (i.e. ornamental) or ‘non display’. Patterns of diversity of these characters were evaluated across 1035 unique species pairs. Display characters were found to diverge rapidly overall, but sympatric species were not found to differ significantly in their ornamental disparity from non-sympatric species, regardless of phylogenetic distance. The prediction of the species recognition hypothesis, and thus the idea that ornamentation evolved as a species recognition mechanism, has no statistical support among known ceratopsians.

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          Most cited references51

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          The Evolution of Animal Weapons

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            Intense Natural Selection in a Population of Darwin's Finches (Geospizinae) in the Galapagos.

            Survival of Darwin's finches through a drought on Daphne Major Island was nonrandom. Large birds, especially males with large beaks, survived best because they were able to crack the large and hard seeds that predominated in the drought. Selection intensities, calculated by O'Donald's method, are the highest yet recorded for a vertebrate population.
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              Convergent and divergent character displacement

              P Grant (1972)
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proc Biol Sci
                Proc. Biol. Sci
                RSPB
                royprsb
                Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
                The Royal Society
                0962-8452
                1471-2954
                28 March 2018
                21 March 2018
                21 March 2018
                : 285
                : 1875
                : 20180312
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Queen Mary University of London , London, UK
                [2 ]Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology , Claremont, CA, USA
                [3 ]Natural History Museum of Utah , Salt Lake City, UT, USA
                Author notes

                Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4025026.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4822-5623
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3446-8715
                Article
                rspb20180312
                10.1098/rspb.2018.0312
                5897650
                29563271
                f84723a8-2043-45a2-a4d5-a001f8484e16
                © 2018 The Authors.

                Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 8 February 2018
                : 1 March 2018
                Funding
                Funded by: Natural Environment Research Council, http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000270;
                Categories
                1001
                70
                144
                183
                Palaeobiology
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                March 28, 2018

                Life sciences
                evolution,sympatry,dinosauria,ceratopsia,species recognition,ornamentation
                Life sciences
                evolution, sympatry, dinosauria, ceratopsia, species recognition, ornamentation

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