Quantifying evolutionary development using non-model organisms: Integrating morphology, metrical frameworks, and gene expression

Keeping pace with the forward progression of evolutionary developmental studies and their trajectory toward ever-more integrative and broad-scale study presents a challenge for researchers from diverse disciplines. Increasing the capacity for discourse and opening opportunity to further interdisciplinary work is highly desirable, and one way that activities can be hindered is through a lack of communication between those developing new methods and those applying methods to new data sets. The goal of this special issue, which brings together contributions from a recent symposium at the 10^th International Congress for Vertebrate Morphology (ICVM 10, Barcelona, July 2013) along with select additions, was to integrate methodological developments with molecular and morphological data to present a broad spectrum of avenues for investigating ontogeny in land vertebrates. A balance between methods-focused papers and papers presenting novel data and perspectives from molecular and morphological approaches in evo-devo was sought with the hope of promoting greater interchange between each side, and drawing attention to new opportunities for future research on non-model organisms.