Doctoral Dissertation Research: Reconstructing evolutionary relationships with dental microstructure

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Developing new methods for interpreting how different hominin species are related to each other becomes even more critical as more fossils are uncovered, more taxa are recognized, and the human lineage apparently displays greater species diversity. This doctoral dissertation project will examine how dental development, reflected in features of the internal microstructure of teeth, might be used to better understand the hominin family tree. Tooth sections from a wide range of living primate species will be analyzed. The project will support graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 science education, training, and outreach, including for individuals from groups that are underrepresented in the STEM fields. Data from the project will also be made available online. A long-standing issue in paleoanthropology is the need for methods that can recover phylogenetic relationships in the hominin fossil record. Extant primates are an important comparative resource for understanding the evolutionary changes and phylogenetic relationships in the human lineage. The objectives of this project are to (1) investigate a set of traits derived from dental microstructure; (2) use phylogenetic comparative methods to determine the utility of dental microstructure variables; and (3) test these variables in an extant group of primates whose molecular phylogeny is well-established. The phylogenetic comparative analyses will help to address the extent to which dental microstructure traits carry a phylogenetic signal and therefore how these traits might be used in a phylogenetic context and applied to the hominin fossil record.