Lambeosaurinae: a model for the comparison of ancestral ontogeny and phylogeny
Name:
Stephen Hobe
Major: Biology & Music Theatre
Hometown: Hickory Hills, IL
Faculty Sponsor:
Thomas Carr
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Independent research
Abstract
The novel technique of recovering growth using cladistic methods has recently been applied to Lambeosaurinae. The cladistic ontogenies of five lambeosaurine taxa from the Dinosaur Park Formation (Late Campanian, Cretaceous) in Alberta, Canada have been recovered. From these ontogenies, a single ancestral ontogeny was obtained for each ancestor in the phylogenetic hierarchy. However, the ancestral ontogenies include very few shared characters due to the small size of each cladistic data set.The primary goal of this work was to (1) include recent phylogenetic data in the five cladistic data sets, (2) to obtain the cladistic ontogeny for Parasaurolophus walkeri, (3) to obtain the new ancestral ontogenies and (4) compare it to recent phylogenetic analyses of lambeosaurinae to identify the processes that drove the evolution of evolutionary novelties in the clade. Hypothetical ontogenetic characters were obtained from the primary and secondary literature, two skulls, and a cast of a juvenile skull. Growth series were obtained using a cladistic approach. Data matrices were constructed in the software program MacClade 4.0; the analyses were run in Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony (PAUP 4.0*).
