Posted by:
chris_harper2
at Wed Sep 15 10:57:22 2004 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by chris_harper2 ]
Hi BGF,
Long time no chat... did you ever get any Madagascarophis specimens for your studies? In case you don't remember I was supposed to send you several specimens a few years back before 9/11/01 messed up international shipping.
But I digress.
In a recent discussion I used the evolution of opistoglyph dentition (OD) as an example of convergent evolution based on your suggestion that OD is a homoplasic trait.
During that discussion I started to fumble the terms analagous, homoplasic, parallelism and convergence and seek your clarification. After being out of the lab for almost two years I'm a bit "rusty" in science speak. My science library was lost in a flood last year so I have no immediate reference source.
I'd appreciate your comments on the following hypothetical example.
In this example we have two species of aglyphous snakes that give rise to two separate lineages of snakes with OD.
The two snakes species are closely related enough that the specific teeth giving rise to the OD are homologous.
Would the resultant OD be an example of homoplasy since they were independent origins?
Or would they be an example of parallelism since OD evolved through an identical evolutionary pathway, albeit independent of each other?
I hope this makes sense.
And to digress again...
I know you like Gonyosoma. Here's a picture of one of my females imported from Java. This picture was taken after her first shed in my care. She really was this orange. Actually, I had to dim the picture down in photoshop to better duplicate her actual color. The original photo was an even brighter orange.
She changes color with every shed so I never know what snake I'm going to see. Awesome animals.
-----
1.1 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Silver/Yellow)
3.4 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Green)
2.1 Gonyosoma janseni - (Black)
[ Hide Replies ]
 Dr. Fry: Homoplasy of Opistoglyph Dentition - chris_harper2, Wed Sep 15 10:57:22 2004 
|
