THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING CONODONT MORPHOLOGY DATABASES AND EXAMPLES FROM PENNSYLVANIAN CONODONT MORPHOSTRATIGRAPHY STUDIES

Conodont species are typically differentiated by presence of anatomical element structures or differences in the element shapes. Species defined by presence or absence of a feature are easy to classify and this morphological information can be readily extracted from a published abundance table and used in future studies. This ability to recover morphological information from an abundance table is similar to recovering the raw data, because it is clear that a particular species correspond to particular features. However, when it comes to shape-based species, there is no raw data available for future workers except for a few photographed specimens. By building landmark-models for particular conodont groups we can begin to archive shape information as tables of X-Y coordinates associated with key anatomical features on the conodont element. By archiving these raw morphological data, they can be accessed again for future studies. This is beneficial for any comprehensive work requiring comparisons to previous studies. These databases can be easily maintained and compiled if time is taken to collect this information. Published photographs in the literature can also have landmarks digitized and be easily incorporated into any new data set. The first step to build a shape database is identifying what are the appropriate landmarks for the conodonts of interest. After creating the landmark model for the group and digitizing those landmarks on all photographs, any subset of specimens can be extracted from the dataset for statistical analysis. The process of building these databases has allowed for recent, comprehensive morphostratigraphic studies to take place that have helped answer questions relating to biostratigraphy, taxonomy, endemism, and phylogeny in Pennsylvanian conodonts.