Dental Morphology and Diet in the Greater Antillean Platyrrhines

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Fossil and subfossil Caribbean monkeys were first collected in the early 1900s, but remained sequestered as unidentified bones in museum drawers in Washington, D.C. and New York for decades before scientists realized several specimens represented unknown recently extinct New World monkeys. During the 1980s and 1990s, renewed collecting efforts on several of the islands revealed more evidence, and now it is clear that primates, like many other vertebrates, have had a long evolutionary history on Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola. This project will focus on the dental morphology and diet of the three named primates (Antillothrix bernensis, Paralouatta varonai, and Xenothrix mcgregori), for which there is dental evidence, and one unnamed Haitian specimen, which represents a new species. Along with a large comparative sample of living New World monkeys and a few fossil forms, the dental morphology of the Antillean primates will be evaluated functionally for dietary information. To accomplish this, all dentitions will first be laser scanned to create three-dimensional models, which will then be analyzed using a variety of statistical techniques, including multivariate analysis and recently developed geometric morphometric methods designed to exploit our new capacity to map surface anatomy three-dimensionally. In addition, the new Haitian species will be systematically described and compared to existing Antillean primates to ascertain its phylogenetic position, dietary adaptation, and ecological role in the Caribbean community. This project has intellectual merit in adding knowledge concerning the taxonomic and adaptive diversity of an understudied group of primates to an area of paleoanthropological interest that has burgeoned during the past two decades and is ready for new paleobiological syntheses based on an impressive new accumulation of fossil evidence stretching from Argentina to Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and the Caribbean. This project will also be one of the first to employ a new suite of methods including high resolution laser scanning for measurement, computer graphics methods for visualization, and three-dimensional geometric morphometric techniques for the analysis of primate dentitions, for both functional and taxonomic questions. This study has broader impacts, too. It will be one of the first to employ statistically robust samples of virtual specimens in anthropology, thus laying the groundwork for disseminating research quality digital objects for scientific and educational purposes. All of the laser scans used in this study will be made available immediately to the general public via the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP) website once the study is completed.