Assessing landmark influence on shape variation

Given two sets of landmark data which differ in shape, it is useful to determine the extent to which shape variation can be explained by the perturbations of individual landmarks.We propose a method for assessing this, based on analysing the relative reduction in distance between the shapes that can be achieved by varying the location of a single landmark. This method is applied to a set of landmark data from the cervical vertebrae of two subspecies of gorillas.