Disparity: Morphological pattern and developmental context. Palaeontology 50:57–73

Abstract: The distribution of organic forms is clumpy at any scale from populations to the highest taxonomic categ-ories, and whether considered within clades or within eco-systems. The fossil record provides little support for expectations that the morphological gaps between species or groups of species have increased through time as it might if the gaps were created by extinction of a more homogen-eous distribution of morphologies. As the quantitative assessments of morphology have replaced counts of higher taxa as a metric of morphological disparity, numerous stud-ies have demonstrated the rapid construction of morpho-space early in evolutionary radiations, and have emphasized the difference between taxonomic measures of morphologi-cal diversity and quantitative assessments of disparity. Other studies have evaluated changing patterns of disparity acros