See more from this Division: General Discipline Sessions
See more from this Session: Paleontology II - Organismal and Morphological Paleontology
Abstract:
This study explores the possible utility of another analytical technique that may have application in the quantification, description and, potentially, phylogenetic analysis of gastropod mollusk shell ornament. Wavelet analysis was originally developed to investigate variations of power in time series, allowing identification of both the dominant modes of periodic variability in the series, and how those modes vary through time. It is a technique that has been applied widely in both physical and biological sciences for examining data that may include periodic components of variation, e.g., oscillations in diversity. However, the x-axis need not be time and any dataset with a regular component of variation with respect to a second, time-analogous dimension, can be used, such as shell profile shape.
Turritelline gastropods are an ideal group for testing this approach. Their shells are a series of non-overlapping whorls with surface ornament that varies in strength and complexity through development. This shell profile can be described as a series of periodic changes over distance from the protoconch, distance which equates to ontogenetic time. Preliminary analyses suggest different species have very different wavelet signatures and that the approach may allow discrimination and quantification of subtly differing sculptural ontogenies.
See more from this Division: General Discipline Sessions
See more from this Session: Paleontology II - Organismal and Morphological Paleontology