Department of pharmacy, Yunnan Medical Health College, Kunming 650106, China

Morphological description is the basis of systematical classification and biodiversity research. Morphometry is the science of quantitative description, analysis and interpretation of morphology and morphological variation. With the development of statistics, it is necessary to analyze very complex data, which objectively leads to the emergence of multivariate morphometry. In the 1980s, the matching of geometric information of punctuation and punctuation relative position made an important breakthrough in data collection and analysis. As a result, the punctuation of multivariate analysis can be superimposed on the original biological map, which can not only generate scatter plot, but also objectively reflect the morphological characteristics of organisms. This research is called geometric morphometry, which is a revolution in morphometry. In the current researches, two kinds of punctuation methods are widely used, one is outline methods, the other is landmark methods. Compared with the traditional morphometric method, geometric morphometry (GMM) is a new type of morphometry, because it can not only accurately and quantitatively describe and analyze the morphological changes between biological samples and samples, but also analyze whether these changes are caused by growth and development, experimental treatment, or genetic evolution, etc., it is a commonly used method in morphological research at this stage. The present paper introduces the development process of geometric morphometrics (Outline method, Landmark method) on the basis of traditional morphometry, and puts forward in-depth summary and prospect on the application of geometric morphometrics in system development analysis, ecology and other aspects.