How the lives of mothers matter to offspring survival in wild primates
A new research paper by Matthew Zipple and coworkers looks at the impact of maternal mortality on offspring survival across seven species of wild primates: “...
A new research paper by Matthew Zipple and coworkers looks at the impact of maternal mortality on offspring survival across seven species of wild primates: “...
A recent paper from Jerilyn Walker and coworkers in the journal BMC Mobile DNA reports that today’s baboons and geladas may have mixed in their history more ...
A fascinating paper in Science Advances today looks at the way that a small platyrrhine monkey species conveys information about predators in its vocal commu...
The New York Times Magazine today has a long-read article about Cayo Santiago, the island just off Puerto Rico where a large colony of rhesus macaques was in...
Scientific American is previewing an article by Michael Haslam from their March issue, “The Other Tool Users”. The article focuses on the use of archaeologic...
Today, Science Advances has released a paper by Jeffrey Rogers and coworkers on the genome diversity of six species of baboons: “The comparative genomics and...
Last summer in the South African Journal of Science, faunal specialist Shaw Badenhorst published a short commentary with an interesting question for early ho...
I ran across a news article from the BBC by Paul Rincon, about a proposed taxonomic revision to patas monkeys in northeastern Africa: “Moustached monkey is s...
My University of Wisconsin–Madison colleague, Karen Strier, has studied the muriqui monkeys of Brazil for her entire career. Now, the in small patch of fores...
This is a nice article by Ed Yong about Michael Haslam’s research documenting how capuchin monkeys incidentally make stone flakes as a side effect of their n...
Ed Yong writes about an examination of the microbiomes of different monkey species in captivity versus wild populations: “Captivity Makes Monkey Microbiomes ...
The Pacific Standard has a very good story by Jason Bittel about aye-ayes: “The Aye-Aye and the Finger of Death”. The story focuses on the interesting behavi...
Carl Zimmer has a nice post today discussing the evolution of endogenous retroviruses in primates: “Our Inner Viruses: Forty Million Years In the Making”. Fr...
BBC Earth is running a story by Colin Barras looking at the origins of music in ancient humans and possible perceptual preadaptation to music in other primat...
Notable paper: Kopp GH, Roos C, Butynski TM, Wildman DE, Alagaili AN, Groeneveld LF, Zinner D. (2014). Out of Africa, but how and when? The case of hamadryas...
The Scientist has a nice article about the evolution of trichromatic vision in primates: “The Rainbow Connection”. Trichromacy in anthropoid primates is a gr...
Nicole Herzog and colleagues spent half a year following a troop of vervet monkeys during the controlled burn season at Loskop Dam Nature Reserve in South Af...
Evan MacLean and colleagues write this week in PNAS about the evolution of self-control.
Smithsonian magazine has a long profile article about my UW-Madison colleague Karen Strier: “Humans would be better off if they monkeyed around like muriquis...
Ecology, diet, competition, and ease of movement all affect the size of primate groups. The structure of primate groups is primarily affected by the mating s...
Primates form different kinds of groups. While there is variation within every species, each species has its own typical range of group sizes. Primate groups...
The diversification of the first primates from other early mammals took place partly because the ancestors of the primates came to inhabit a unique environme...
Incredible! The primatologist Franz de Waal has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his, well, applied work:
Out of all the lectures in the course, this was one of my favorites to put together. I return to the topic of evolutionary developmental biology, first raise...
Ed Yong reports on new research from Eila Roberts, with Jacinta Beehner’s research group at the University of Michigan, who was able to show that the rate of...
The incisors are the front teeth. They are basically flat and have a blade-like occlusal surface. Each quadrant has two incisors.
Our relationship to other kinds of primates is in part reflected by the pattern of similarities and differences we share with them. This pattern of similarit...
An important difference among some primate species is their ability to get foods that are hidden or protected by natural defenses. A little cleverness may yi...
Between the skull and the sacrum, humans have 24 vertebrae. Well, most humans, anyway. Sometimes humans have a few more or less.
The aye-aye is possibly the world’s strangest primate. The species is native to Madagascar, and falls into the family of all primates from that island, the l...
A new paper in Nature by Zhe-Xi Luo and colleagues Luo:Jurassic:2011 reports the discovery of a 160-million-year-old early mammal, Juramaia, which they attri...
This study has been out for a few weeks, and I’ve been meaning to put up a short comment about it: “Representational format determines numerical competence i...
Let me be honest: when I started doing paleoanthropology, I really did not expect I’d be talking about Neandertal penises.
Barbara J. King has written a short essay about why she loves anthropology:
Anthony Di Fiore writes in the NY Times “Notes from the field” feature about his work with spider monkeys in Ecuador: “Spider monkey fathers and sons”.
Noah Snyder-Mackler’s continuing series in the NY Times’ “Scientist at Work” blog has been providing a journal of his fieldwork on gelada baboons.
Carl Zimmer reports on last week’s study showing rhesus macaques apparently passing the “Gallup test” for mirror self-recognition. I was talking about this i...
Donald McNeil, Jr., has written up some background detail about last week’s story that falciparum malaria came from gorillas: “A finding on malaria comes fro...
A Primate of Modern Aspect (“The sexuality wars, featuring apes”) writes about some of the reactions to the new book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of...
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an “internal document” from the Marc Hauser investigation: “Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard”. T...
Re: australopithecine tools:
Maybe by now everybody has seen the story about Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser:
Jonah Lehrer in Wired has a long profile of Robert Sapolsky and his work on stress in baboons: “Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine”
I’ve been giving the background to the question, “Were there Cretaceous anthropoids?” (“The problem in a nutshell”, “What is an anthropoid?”)
Conservation biologist Eleanor Sterling is running a blog of field notes from a survey for langurs in Vietnam, in the NY Times “Scientist at Work” blog zone.
This is the second post in a series, “Were there Cretaceous anthropoids?”
The evolution of early primates is a field that has developed rapidly in the last fifteen years. Many of the central issues were reviewed earlier this year b...
The end of the Eocene was a rough time for a lot of Earth’s flora and fauna – it is recognized as a major extinction event, the Grande Coupure. Substantial g...
I ran across this passage in a book chapter by D. Tab Rasmussen, covering early catarrhine evolution. I think it captures an important point about the fossil...
Question:
Matthew Cobb wrote recently about olfactory receptor evolution in primates: “You smell like a chimp.. and like a marmoset”.
Gretchen found this one:
Carl Zimmer’s post about simian immunodeficiency virus (“AIDS and the virtues of slow-cooked science”) gives some thoughts about the relation of big-budget l...
Jenny Tung of Duke University and colleagues report in Nature (online early) that yellow baboons have evolved a Duffy antigen-related defense against a baboo...
Clifford Jolly's review article in the 2001 Yearbook of Physical Anthropology pretty much covers every aspect for which baboons make an analogy for human ev...