Dynamic Morphospaces for Animal Locomotion: A Case Study in Bird Flight

Morphospaces represent the range of possible biological designs by placing different shapes into a common geometric space. They have revealed that high-dimensional morphological diversity in biological systems tends to concentrate along a reduced set of coordinated axes. Here, we argue that extending this framework from static form to dynamic behavior provides a principled way to describe, compare, and translate animal locomotion. Constructing a kinematic morphospace from landmark positions yields a Euclidean space that supports not just dimensionality reduction but reconstruction, projection into shared coordinate systems, and formal comparison of subspaces across individuals and species. Dynamic Mode Decomposition is an additional complementary approach which identifies how shape changes are sequenced in time. Drawing on avian flight as a case study, we review how these tools connect the morphospace tradition in evolutionary biology to emerging questions in locomotor biomechanics, and discuss how the biological morphospace can serve as a common coordinate system for bio-informed engineering design.