and Historical Review of the Subject -- Why Morphometrics? -- Morphometrics: An Historical Essay -- Methodological Approach (Quantification and Visualization of Shape, and Traditional and Geometric Morphometrics) -- Controlling for Curvature in the Quantification of Leaf Form -- Discriminating Groups of Organisms -- Visual Analysis in Archaeology. An Artificial Intelligence Approach -- Evolution of the Upper Cretaceous Oysters: Traditional Morphometrics Approach -- Applications -- Combining Shape Data and Traditional Measurements with the 2B-PLS: Testing the Covariation Between Avian Brain Size and Cranial Shape Variation as an Example -- Biogeographic Analysis Using Geometric Morphometrics: Clines in Skull Size and Shape in a Widespread African Arboreal Monkey -- Stock Identification of Marine Populations -- Correlating Shape Variation with Feeding Performance to Test for Adaptive Divergence in Recently Invading Stickleback Populations from Swiss peri-alpine Environments -- Macroevolutionary Trends in the Skull of Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs – The Largest Terrestrial Animals to Have Ever Lived -- The Use of Geometric Morphometrics in Studying Butterfly Wings in an Evolutionary Ecological Context -- Towards Automating Artifact Analysis: A Study Showing Potential Applications of Computer Vision and Morphometrics to Artifact Typology -- Morphometric Analysis Applied to the Archaeological Pottery of the Valley of Guadalquivir -- Some Applications of Geometric Morphometrics to Archaeology -- Scope to the Future of Morphometrics -- Prospectus: The Future of Morphometrics -- Morphometrics and Cosmology: Short Note and Future Hope -- Morphometrics in Past: Integrating Morphometrics with General Data Analysis Software.

Morphometrics is concerned with the study of variations and change in the form (size and shape) of organisms or objects adding a quantitative element to descriptions and thereby facilitating the comparison of different objects and organisms. This volume provides an introduction to morphometrics in a clear and simple way without recourse to complex mathematics and statistics. This introduction is followed by a series of case studies describing the variety of applications of morphometrics from paleontology and evolutionary ecology to archaeological artifacts analysis. This is followed by a presentation of future applications of morphometrics and state of the art software for analyzing and comparing shape.