Doctoral Dissertation Research: Community Ecology of Living and Fossil Cercopithecid Primates

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Old World monkeys are found across Africa and Asia today with various physical and behavioral adaptations that allow them to survive and coexist in a range of habitats. Fossils from Africa show a similar pattern of Old World monkey diversity and coexistence in the past, although not all of these fossil species survived to the present. This doctoral dissertation project will examine how Old World monkey communities change in response to local environmental conditions and why some species within these communities are more successful than others. Dental features associated with dietary adaptations will be used to reconstruct the ecologies of living and fossil Old World monkeys and to compare across communities from different temporal and geographic settings. This will provide long-term context for understanding the present-day diversity of Old World monkey communities and for predicting potential responses of these communities to ongoing and future environmental change. This project will directly engage undergraduates in research, including students from traditionally underrepresented groups in STEM. Photographs and measurement data will be made freely available online to other researchers; they will also be used to create written articles and educational materials shared with local schools and museums, and posted online for the general public on the AskAnAnthropologist.asu.edu website. A range of climatic, ecological, biogeographical, and phylogenetic hypotheses have been proposed to explain how and why present-day primate communities contain certain combinations of species and adaptations. This project uses a broad temporal and geographic sample of Old World monkey communities in Africa and Asia today and in the African fossil record to systematically test hypotheses linking species diversity, adaptation, and extinction with local environmental phenomena. Dental metric data will be used to create a multivariate model of the Old World monkey ecomorphological niche, from which the researchers will calculate and compare community niche volumes, positions, and overlap. Model selection will then be used to evaluate the relative influence of climate factors, habitat structure, mammalian competition, and dispersal barriers in leading communities to have similar or distinct ecomorphological niches. As Old World monkeys are well-represented in the fossil and present-day communities, they provide an ideal model for understanding complex patterns of diversity and extinction in the past, present, and future. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.