Data & Software
from the McPeek Lab
Datasets
Please cite the appropriate paper when using this data in your own work.
Extant Species Richness and Crown Group Age from the fossil record in McPeek and Brown (2007)
Software
SPHARM
SPHARM is a software application to perform 3-dimensional spherical harmonic analyses of triangular mesh surfaces. The analyses performed in this package are described in Shen et al. (2009 Evolution, in press). Spherical harmonic analyses are a 3D extension of Fourier analyses that generate a 3D mathematical model of an object's surface.
To construct a spherical harmonic model of an object using SPHARM, a triangular mesh representation of the object and a set of landmarks are needed to define the object. The triangular mesh consists of a dense coverage of points (i.e., vertices) on the object's surface and lines connecting the points to form a complete set of triangles (i.e., faces) that define the surface. The landmarks are used to orient and register a series of objects relative to one another so that they can be compared.
SPHARM is written in Matlab (The Mathworks, Natick, Massachusetts). To run SPHARM, download the zip file from the link below.