One of the absolute greats of primatology, Toshisada Nishida (March 3, 1941– June 7, 2011), recently passed away at the age of 70 (Figure 1). We have come such a long way in our knowledge of chimpanzees, and the discoveries have reached us in such a gradual and cumulative fashion, that it is easy to forget how little was known when Nishida set out for Africa to establish one of the first chimpa...

Most of our knowledge of wild chimpanzee behaviour stems from fewer than 10 long-term field sites. This bias limits studies to a potentially unrepresentative set of communities known to show great behavioural diversity on small geographic scales. Here, we introduce a new genetic approach to bridge the gap between behavioural material evidence in unhabituated chimpanzees and genetic advances in ...

Our understanding of primate evolution is ultimately based on patterns of phyletic relationship and morphological change documented in the fossil record. Stratophenetic interpretation of living and fossil primates yields an objective alternative to the arbitrary scala naturae assumed implicitly in traditional comparative biology. Fossils provide an outline of primate history constraining compar...

Comparative morphology, dealing with the diversity of form and shape, and functional morphology, the study of the relationship between the structure and the function of an organism's parts, are both important subdisciplines in biological research. Virtual anthropology (VA) contributes to comparative morphology by taking advantage of technological innovations, and it also offers new opportunitie...

Although many Malagasy lemurs are thought to be female dominant and to have female feeding priority, to date the relationship between these behaviors has been rigorously established only in Lemur catta, and other ways that females might achieve feeding priority have not been examined closely. Erhart and Overdorff [International Journal of Primatology 20:927-940, 1999] suggested that one way fem...

THE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the humanmind and brain, as Darwin himself was the first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural scie...

Plant allocation to reproduction and growth is not evenly spread over time. In most plant species, production of flowers, fruits, and leaves is confined to a limited portion of the year (Leith 1974; van Schaik and Pfannes 2005). In some taxa, bouts of flowering, fruiting, and leaf flushing may be separated by periods of many years (e.g., Southeast Asian mast flowering and fruiting: Wich and van...

Little is known about the impact of enormous eyeballs on the tarsier's head, apart from facial morphology. I used a biomechanical analysis to compare the cranium of Tarsius with the Eocene fossil Necrolemur, a moderately large-eyed surrogate for ancestral tarsiid cranial morphology. Eyeball hypertrophy has radically influenced the neurocranium and basicranium, driving the evolution of such deri...

V. Sommer and C. Ross (eds.), Primates of Gashaka, Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects 35, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7403-7_14, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract All great ape taxa are considered endangered due to a combination of habitat loss, hunting, disease outbreaks and human population increase. The bush-meat trade is thought to be the biggest threat to the...