Norman MacLeodNanjing University | NJU · School of Earth Sciences and Engineering
Norman MacLeod
Doctor of Philosophy
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186
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (186)
The Bemisia tabaci species-complex is a group of tropical-subtropical hemipterans, some species of which have achieved global distribution over the past 150 years. Several species are regarded currently as among the world’s most pernicious agricultural pests, causing a variety of damage types via direct feeding and plant-disease transmission. Long...
The phylogenetic ecology and wing ecomorphology of the Afro-Asian dragonfly genus Trithemis have been investigated previously. Curiously, results reported for the forewing and hindwing shape variation in the latter were, in some ways, at odds with expectations given the mapping of landscape and water-body preferences over the Trithemis cladogram. T...
The long‐running controversy over typological concept use in archaeological investigations hinges on whether such procedures introduce assumptions, and channel interpretations, in ways that can equate analytical groups with bounded cultural‐historical units inappropriately. James A. Ford's writings, in reaction to the arguments of Albert Spaulding,...
Background:
Studies of mammalian sexual dimorphism have traditionally involved the measurement of selected dimensions of particular skeletal elements and use of single data-analysis procedures. Consequently, such studies have been limited by a variety of both practical and conceptual constraints. To compare and contrast what might be gained from a...
A finer record of biodiversity
We have pressing, human-generated reasons to explore the influence of environmental change on biodiversity. Looking into the past can not only inform our understanding of this relationship but also help us to understand current change. Paleontological records depend on fossil availability and predictive modeling, howe...
A metric analysis of the morphology of two related Eocene species (Podocyrtis sinuosa and P. mitra) that are part of the Lampterium evolutionary lineage was undertaken in order to evaluate hypotheses related to their mutual taxonomic distinction statistically. All analyses (landmark, outline semi-landmark and landmark-constrained outlines) support...
Sciurus vulgaris is a widespread, highly polytypic tree squirrel species, under which a large number of subspecies have been described. This study tests the robustness of the current subspecific classification by using geometric morphometrics to quantify morphological variation in mandible shape, along with canonical variates analysis to test hypot...
Sciurus vulgaris is a widespread, highly polytypic tree squirrel species, under which a large number of subspecies have been described. This study tests the robustness of the current subspecific classification by using geometric morphometrics to quantify morphological variation in mandible shape, along with canonical variates analysis to test hypot...
Archaeologists often wish to distinguish between groups of cultural artifacts using information collected from descriptions or measurements of their morphological forms. Morphometric methods have played an increasingly large role in such quantitative assessments. However, standard approaches to morphometric analyses are often poorly suited to many...
The Old World screwworm fly (OWSF), Chrysomya bezziana (Diptera: Calliphoridae), is an important agent of traumatic myiasis and, as such, a major human and animal health problem. In the implementation of OWSF control operations, it is important to determine the geographical origins of such disease‐causing species in order to establish whether they...
Many of the samples chosen for morphometric analysis represent minor variations on a strongly expressed, single geometric theme. In such cases failure to eliminate the effect of this theme can result in the generation of a variety of unusual, unexpected, and seemingly counterintuitive multivariate data-analysis results. This effect was first identi...
Research into the relationship between leaf form and climate over the last century has revealed that, in many species, the sizes and shapes of leaf characters exhibit highly structured and predictable patterns of variation in response to the local climate. Several procedures have been developed that quantify covariation between the relative abundan...
Gogia is a primitive genus of pelmatozoan echinoderm the investigation of whose systematics, taxonomy, and palaeoecology has been invigorated recently by the recovery and description of articulated specimens and related genera of blastozoan species from Cambrian strata in Utah and China. To date investigation of gogiid systematics has been undertak...
Although the end-Cretaceous extinction event goes by a variety of names in both the technical and popular literature (e.g., Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, K-T boundary extinction, Cretaceous-Paleocene (K-Pg) mass extinction, Cretaceous-Palaeogene (K-Pg) extinction), it is most closely associated with the uppermost Cretaceous System/Stag...
The contemporary concept of biozone is that of a stratigraphical interval defined on the basis of its biotic content. This deceptively simple definition serves as the door to vast realms of complexity, access to which is important not only because those realms contain much of the early history of geology, but also because they encompasses the singl...
Stratigraphy is the branch of geology that deals with the formation, composition, sequence, and correlation of stratified rocks. Since the whole Earth is stratified, at least in a broad sense, bodies of all the different types of rock – igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic – are subject to stratigraphic study and analysis. In most cases, however,...
The Cretaceous System/Period is the last major subdivision of Mesozoic time. Established by JJ d'Omalius d'Halloy in 1822, the Cretaceous and was divided into Upper and Lower series/epochs by WD Conybeare and William Phillips that same year. Cretaceous rocks are currently assigned to 12 stage/age-level subdivisions, the combination of which represe...
Snout shape is a prominent aspect of herbivore feeding ecology, interacting with both forage selectivity and intake rate. Previous investigations have suggested ruminant feeding styles can be discriminated via snout shape, with grazing and browsing species characterised by 'blunt' and 'pointed' snouts respectively, often with specification of an 'i...
The geological record represents the only source of data available for documenting long-term historical patterns of extinction intensity and extinction susceptibility. Such data are critical for testing hypotheses of extinction causality in the modern world as well as in deep time. The study of extinction is relatively new. Prior to 1800, extinctio...
While the correct logical formulation of a scientific hypothesis test is taught to virtually every child in their secondary school curriculum, the manner in which scientific researchers approach the resolution of questions concerning the cause(s) of natural phenomena is often misunderstood and/or
The repatriation of human remains from western museums back to their communities of origin is often presented as a symbolizing a fundamental dichotomy between the scientific research and the claimant communities with regard to the manner in which these remains are valued, across which little other than a common and intense interest in them exists....
9 Snout shape is a prominent aspect of herbivore feeding ecology, controlling both 10 forage selectivity and intake rate. Many previous investigations have suggested that ruminant 11 feeding classes can be discriminated via snout shape, with grazing and browsing species 12 attributed 'blunt' and 'pointed' snouts respectively, with an intermediate s...
Plankton counting and analysis is essential in ecological study, yet scant literature exists as to the reliability of those counts and the consistency of the experts who make the counts. To assess how variable expert taxonomic identifications are, a set of six archived mesozooplankton samples from a series of Longhurst Hardy Plankton Recorder net h...
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Snout shape is a prominent aspect of herbivore feeding ecology, controlling both forage selectivity and intake rate. Many previous investigations have suggested that ruminant feeding classes can be discriminated via snout shape, with grazing and browsing species attributed ‘blunt’ and ‘pointed’ snouts respectively, with an intermediate sub-grouping...
Few investigations have sought to compare the performance of alternative types of morphological data and data analysis approaches for purpose of biological species identification. This investigation contrasts results of form characterization via form factors, superposed landmark coordinates, semilandmark outlines, 3D semilandmark grid networks, and...
Background / Purpose:
Here, we assessed the validity of shape-based descrimination of ecological groups within extant ruminants, using geometric morphometric techniques. From this data, we then wanted to see if it can be used to delimit other unknown herbivorous taxa to infer their ecology.
Main conclusion:
Browsers and grazers can be delimite...
The Natural History Museum in London recently hosted an international, multidisciplinary conference that brought together 150 researchers in geology, geophysics, geochemistry, volcanology, sedimentology, paleontology, and astronomy to review and assess recent research into the causes of mass extinction events. Participants included experts as well...
An up-to-date atlas of an important fossil and living group, with the Natural History Museum.
Deep-sea benthic foraminifera have played a central role in biostratigraphic, paleoecological, and paleoceanographical research for over a century. These single–celled marine protists are important because of their geographic ubiquity, distinction morpho...
Unlike many other types of museums, the collections of natural history museums are vast. Holdings that number in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions are by no means unusual. However, there is also present and growing expectation that museums will make information about their collections available online and free-of-charge. Mo...
In the quarter century since the development of geometric morphometrics the community of practitioners has largely been occupied with training issues and anatomy-based applications research in the biological sciences. However, just as the scope of geometry transcends comparative anatomy, the potential scope of morphometric analysis transcends inves...
The K–Pg mass extinction event occurred at the end of the Cretaceous System (K, for kreta or chalk, a common Cretaceous rock type) and the beginning of the Paleogene System (Pg). During the last million years of the Cretaceous, just prior to the K–Pg boundary, between 40% and 75% of marine invertebrate and terrestrial vertebrate species disappear f...
Studies of morphological adaptation aim to quantify the relationship between an organism's form and its ecology. In the past such studies have been hampered by an over-reliance on either qualitative observations or the collection of a few, marginally representative two-dimensional linear measurements as morphological descriptors. Recent advances in...
Phylogenetic models have recently been proposed for data that are best represented as a mathematical function (i.e. function valued). Such methods can be used to model the change over time in function-based descriptions of various data of interest to evolutionary biologists, including the sound of speech. This approach to phylogenetic inference and...
To date, the forcipules have played almost no role in determining the systematics of scutigeromorph centipedes though in his 1974 review of taxonomic characters Markus Würmli suggested some potentially informative variation might be found in these structures. Geometric morphometric analyses were used to evaluate Würmli's suggestion, specifically to...
The analysis of morphology is crucial to the study of phylogeny in many ancient and modern organismal groups. Recently a number of arguments have been made in favor of regarding certain kinds of morphometric variables as putatively homologous characters and allowing them to participate, along with other non-morphometric variables, in parsimony-base...
The evolutionary history of the Order Carnivora is marked by episodes of iterative evolution. Although this pattern is widely reported in different carnivoran families, the mechanisms driving the evolution of carnivoran skull morphology remain largely unexplored. In this study we use coordinate-point extended eigenshape analysis (CP-EES) to summari...
Elewa A. T. M. (ed.) 2010. Morphometrics for Nonmorphometricians. Lecture Notes in Earth Sciences, vol. 124. xii + 367pp. Springer-Verlag. Price £117.00, US$169.00 (HB). ISBN 978 3 540 95852 9. - Volume 148 Issue 3 - Norman MacLeod
![FIGURE 3. Lepidotes pankowskii sp.nov. BMNH P.66856 [Holotype] skull in...](profile/Adriana-Lopez-Arbarello/publication/235800819/figure/fig2/AS:393354069200900@1470794326718/Lepidotes-pankowskii-spnov-BMNH-P66856-Holotype-skull-in-dorsal-view-with_Q320.jpg)
![FIGURE 5. Lepidotes pankowskii sp.nov. BMNH P.66856 [Holotytpe]....](profile/Adriana-Lopez-Arbarello/publication/235800819/figure/fig3/AS:393354069200901@1470794326822/Lepidotes-pankowskii-spnov-BMNH-P66856-Holotytpe-Ventral-view-of-snout-region-to_Q320.jpg)
A species of semionotiform fish, Lepidotes pankowskii sp. nov. is described from the Cenomanian Kem Kem Beds of south-eastern Morocco, based on two three-dimensionally well-preserved partial heads. The new species is distinguished by the presence of suborbitals lying anterior to the orbit. It is most closely similar to other late Mesozoic tritoral...
Morphological diversity is often caused by altered gene expression of key developmental regulators. However, the precise developmental trajectories through which morphologies evolved remain poorly understood. It is also unclear to what degree genetic changes contributing to morphological divergence were fixed by natural selection. Here we investiga...
Taxonomists should work with specialists in pattern recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence, say Norman MacLeod, Mark Benfield and Phil Culverhouse - more accuracy and less drudgery will result.
![Figure][1]
Deccan plateau basalts.
Lava from Deccan volcanism formed distinct layering.
CREDIT: GSFC/NASA
In the Review “The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary” (P. Schulte et al. , 5 March, p. [1214][2]), the terminal Cretaceous
IN THE REVIEW "THE CHICXULUB ASTEROID IMPACT AND MASS EXTINCTION AT THE CRETACEOUS-Paleogene boundary" (P. Schulte et al., 5 March, p. 1214), the terminal Cretaceous extinctions were confi dently attributed to a single event, the environmental consequences of the impact of an extraterrestrial body. The list of 41 authors, although suggesting a cons...
Few have sought to compare the performance of alternative types of morphological data for biological species identification. This investigation contrasts results of form characterization via form factors, superposed landmark coordinates, landmark-registered semilandmark outlines, 3D semilandmark networks, and raw digital images for a test set of se...
Various methods of multivariate statistical analysis applied to collections of the ammonite Knemiceras from the Albian of Lebanon and Iran support the validity of three species of the genus, recognized on traditional descriptive grounds: K. persicum COLLIGNON, 1983, K. syriacum (VON BUCH 1848a) and K. dubertreti BASSE, 1940. The status of a fourth...
In his most recent book on images W. J. T. Mitchell poses the question ?What do pictures want??, implying that pictures may have an independent life. While it is clear Mitchell is making a rhetorical argument, he is drawn repeatedly to the various life?like properties pictures seem to possess in terms of their affect on people. To resolve the appar...
The female gonopods of the Scutigeromorpha have traditionally played an important taxonomic role but to date have only been compared using simple indices and general shape descriptions. Extended eigenshape analysis and relative warps analysis were used to evaluate the taxonomic information content of these structures. Gonopod shapes of five species...
The female gonopods of the Scutigeromorpha have traditionally played an important taxonomic role but to date have only been compared using simple indices and general shape descriptions. Extended eigenshape analysis and relative warps analysis were used to evaluate the taxonomic information content of these structures. Gonopod shapes of five species...
The abundance of termites in many habitats, in particular tropical forests, makes them a valuable source of food for potential predators. Termites have developed a complex system of colony defence that includes the nest, and worker and soldier castes. A classification exists for the mechanical types of soldier defence, which is based on the relatio...
The clade Talpidae consists of specialized fossorial forms, shrew-like moles and semi-aquatic desmans. As with all higher jawed vertebrates, different functional, phylogenetic and developmental constraints act on different parts of dentary influencing its shape. In order to determine whether morphological variation in the dentary was unified or dis...
Previous attempts to sex juvenile skeletons have focused on the application of qualitative or semi-quantitative techniques. This study applies a variety of geometric morphometric methods, including eigenshape analysis, to this problem. Six metric criteria for the ilia were tested with the aim of investigating previous ideas concerning sexually diag...
We present a new geometric morphometric method called 'eigensurface analysis' for the quantitative analysis of three-dimensional (3D) surfaces. Eigensurface can be viewed as an extension of outline-and landmark-based geometric methods to deal with complete 3D surfaces of objects. We applied eigensurface analysis to the problem of functional inferen...
Morphological data are so ubiquitous in systematics they are often taken for granted. At a time when many students of modern organisms have turned their attention to molecular methods in order to solve problems of phylogenetic inference (Felsenstein, 2003; Salemi and Vandamme, 2003) and acknowledging that many see a bright future for DNA barcoding...
One approach to addressing long-standing concerns associated with the taxonomic impediment and the low reproducibility of taxonomic data is through development of automated species identification sys-tems. Such systems can, in principal, be combined with either image-based, or image and text-based, taxonomic databases to add elements of expert-syst...
Extinction is the act or process of dying-out of a species or evolutionary lineage. It is one of the commonest of all ecological/evolutionary processes and represents the inevitable corollary of natural selection. Information on extinction comes from many sources, including laboratory experiments, field studies and the fossil record. The causes of...
Projects
Projects (2)
To study the evolution of insect wing colour patterns using eigenimage analysis
To improve the objectivity, consistency, speed and accuracy of taxonomic identifications of organisms via application of automated machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision approaches to the analysis of images. This is an outgrowth of my long-standing research program in biological morphometrics which focus on the issue of group characterization/discrimination rather than the ordination of landmark and/or boundary outline data. Such procedures are quicker to apply, and arguably more useful in many contexts, than geometric morphometrics.