Doctoral Dissertation Research: Dental Topography in Primate and Rodent Radiations

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Understanding how patterns of primate adaptation relate to ecological opportunity and competition is important for reconstructing primate and hominin biodiversity through time. This doctoral dissertation project will advance knowledge about primate adaptation using a quantitative and comparative framework to examine ecological pressures on skeletal shape and diversity for Eocene and Miocene fossil primates, with comparison to fossil rodent taxa. This project involves training and mentoring of undergraduate students, including from groups underrepresented in STEM research, outreach activities to high school students, and public sharing of scanned data through Morphosource.This project will examine the adaptive variability and morphological diversity of primate clades broadly (comparing primates to rodents) and specifically (comparing different primate clades). Disparity and morphotype will be quantified using dental topography of middle Eocene - middle Miocene endemic primates and rodents from both continents. Dental topography will be reconstructed through time and analyzed using phylogenetic comparative methods, allowing for the statistical comparison of disparity and morphotype between different clades and landmasses through time at set intervals. Specifically, this project will 1) test whether the diversification patterns of anthropoid primates differ significantly through time between Afro-Arabia and South America, and compare these patterns to those of hystricognath rodents on the same continents, and 2) identify shifts in dental topographic morphotype throughout the primate and rodent lineages of both continents and assess whether these shifts share similarities and/or differences in timing, degree, and magnitude.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.