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<p class="MsoNormal">Good morning,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My name is Nicolas Delsol and I am currently a graduate student in the Environmental Archaeology program at the Florida Museum of Natural History (curator: Kitty Emery, cc’ed here). As a research assistant in Dr. Emery’s lab, I am collaborating
to a large NSF-funded project that aims at documenting the domestication of Mesoamerican turkeys using a variety of methods (zooarchaeology, ancient DNA, geometric morphometrics).
<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">We are working on developing a protocol to analyze the morphological variability of turkeys across time in different regions of Mexico and Central America, particularly trying to track the evolution of certain functional traits on limb
bones with selective breeding and the birds captivity. There is very little literature on birds GMM so we were particularly interested in using the GPSA method since it offers a great potential to explore and identify areas of variation in different specimens.
Using your software, we could generate some “heatmaps” that describe such areas of differential variability.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">While these 3d models offer a great visualization technique, I was wondering if it was possible to statistically assess this variability, for example using one of the generated data files such as _gpsa_homologized_points.dat or _gpsa_interspecimenPSMvalues.dat.
I have read the 2017 article on GPSA but I could not clearly identify what these files could be used for.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Another question that arose from our discussions is how to deal with fragmentary specimens. Since we are dealing with archaeological remains, complete bones are quite scarce so we were wondering if you had
<span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">recommendations for working with less-than-perfect specimens.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">Are there some other published case studies of potential uses of GPSA that could help us in our study?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">Many thanks</span>
<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#4472C4">Nicolas Delsol<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#4472C4">Ph.D. Candidate<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#4472C4">Florida Museum of Natural History – University of Florida<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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