Title: adaptive facies
[reply to letter below on VP list, but applying also to
nonvertebrates - sorry for the duplication]
There is no standard terminology. Further, I don't
see why there should be one. One can compare organisms in quite
a number of ways, even in their morphology. Yes, cheetahs and
horses and heffalumps and ostriches and opilionids and
craneflies and some basketball players and mebbe even octopusses have
rather long legs, but they're pretty distinct in some other
ways.
I've used "adaptive
facies" to refer to what unites fuzzily bounded groupings
such as mole-like animals (which might include gryllotalpids for some
purposes) or algae or carnivores. Thus all rodents fall into
the broad herbivore adaptive facies even though not all are
herbivorous, but the situation for the carnivorans is less
clear. Such facies obviously have no direct
correspondence with phylogenies, but they can be mapped onto
phylogenies to indicate where taxa should be delimited.
Adaptive facies themselves have fuzzily bounded
components. Thus one might restrict oneself to what could be
called morphofacies or behavioral facies or
trophic facies. But to say that a giraffe conforms well
to the longicrural or even grallic morphofacies would seem to get us
into the realm or sesquipedalian obfuscatory prolixity.
Leigh
Leigh Van
Valen
leigh@uchicago.edu
Professor of Ecology and Evolution, and the Conceptual Foundations of
Science
Dept. Ecology and Evolution
University of Chicago
1101 E. 57
St.
[Zoology Bldg., room 403]
Chicago, Ill. 60637, USA
773-702-9475
(fax:
773-702-9740)
Just out of curiosity, is there a standard
terminology to bauplains (body morphs?).
. . . anyway, there are several repeated body morphs
through time. The easiest is snake like, long limbless or nearly
limbless, long snouted, long legged, etc.
For a better examples, lonchorhynchinae, phytosaurs, gavails, etc.
All have long skulls.
Some therapsids have long legs, sphenosuchids, cats,
etc.
Estemmosuchids/wart hogs.
Is there terminology to cover those and other
morphs?
Tracy L.
Ford
P. O. Box 1171
Poway Ca 92074