Evolution of locomotion in Anthropoidea: the semicircular canal evidence |
| |
Authors: | Ryan Timothy M Silcox Mary T Walker Alan Mao Xianyun Begun David R Benefit Brenda R Gingerich Philip D Köhler Meike Kordos László McCrossin Monte L Moyà-Solà Salvador Sanders William J Seiffert Erik R Simons Elwyn Zalmout Iyad S Spoor Fred |
| |
Affiliation: | Department of Anthropology and Center for Quantitative Imaging, EMS Energy Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. tmr21@psu.edu |
| |
Abstract: | Our understanding of locomotor evolution in anthropoid primates has been limited to those taxa for which good postcranial fossil material and appropriate modern analogues are available. We report the results of an analysis of semicircular canal size variation in 16 fossil anthropoid species dating from the Late Eocene to the Late Miocene, and use these data to reconstruct evolutionary changes in locomotor adaptations in anthropoid primates over the last 35 Ma. Phylogenetically informed regression analyses of semicircular canal size reveal three important aspects of anthropoid locomotor evolution: (i) the earliest anthropoid primates engaged in relatively slow locomotor behaviours, suggesting that this was the basal anthropoid pattern; (ii) platyrrhines from the Miocene of South America were relatively agile compared with earlier anthropoids; and (iii) while the last common ancestor of cercopithecoids and hominoids likely was relatively slow like earlier stem catarrhines, the results suggest that the basal crown catarrhine may have been a relatively agile animal. The latter scenario would indicate that hominoids of the later Miocene secondarily derived their relatively slow locomotor repertoires. |
| |
Keywords: | vestibular system generalized least-squares analysis primates |
本文献已被 PubMed 等数据库收录! |