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Full-Text Articles in Paleontology
Early Anthropoid Femora Reveal Divergent Adaptive Trajectories In Catarrhine Hind-Limb Evolution, Sergio Almecija, Melissa Tallman, Hesham M. Sallam, John G. Fleagle, Ashley S. Hammond, Erik R. Seiffert
Early Anthropoid Femora Reveal Divergent Adaptive Trajectories In Catarrhine Hind-Limb Evolution, Sergio Almecija, Melissa Tallman, Hesham M. Sallam, John G. Fleagle, Ashley S. Hammond, Erik R. Seiffert
Peer Reviewed Articles
The divergence of crown catarrhines—i.e., the split of cercopithecoids (Old World monkeys) from hominoids (apes and humans)—is a poorly understood phase in our shared evolutionary history with other primates. The two groups differ in the anatomy of the hip joint, a pattern that has been linked to their locomotor strategies: relatively restricted motion in cercopithecoids vs. more eclectic movements in hominoids. Here we take advantage of the first well-preserved proximal femur of the early Oligocene stem catarrhine Aegyptopithecus to investigate the evolution of this anatomical region using 3D morphometric and phylogenetically-informed evolutionary analyses. Our analyses reveal that cercopithecoids and hominoids …
Identifying Dietary And Migratory Patterns Of Illinois Woolly Mammoth Populations Using Isotope Analysis Of Carbon, Oxygen, And Strontium, Matthew Harrington, Chris Widga, Al Wanamaker, Doug Walker
Identifying Dietary And Migratory Patterns Of Illinois Woolly Mammoth Populations Using Isotope Analysis Of Carbon, Oxygen, And Strontium, Matthew Harrington, Chris Widga, Al Wanamaker, Doug Walker
Celebration of Learning
The extinct woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) ranged from Alaska to the Northeastern Seaboard throughout the Late Pleistocene (100-10 Ka). Although it is recognized that woolly mammoths coincided with and lived in a region heavily influenced by glacial ice sheets, little is known about their dietary or migratory behavior. This study classifies and provides insight into the diet and mobility of Midwestern mammoths by analyzing stable isotopes of carbon, oxygen, and strontium preserved in the tooth enamel of these extinct elephantids. A woolly mammoth tooth from Moline, IL, was bulk-sampled and micromilled to extract the aforementioned isotopes from the …
Betting & Hierarchy In Paleontology, Leonard Finkelman
Betting & Hierarchy In Paleontology, Leonard Finkelman
Faculty Publications
In his Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences, Adrian Currie argues that historical scientists should be optimistic about success in reconstructing the past on the basis of future research. This optimism follows in part from examples of success in paleontology. I argue that paleontologists’ success in these cases is underwritten by the hierarchical nature of biological information: extinct organisms have extant analogues at various levels of taxonomic, ecological, and physiological hierarchies, and paleontologists are adept at exploiting analogies within one informational hierarchy to infer information in another. On this account, fossils serve the role …
Crossed Tracks: Mesolimulus, Archaeopteryx, And The Nature Of Fossils, Leonard Finkelman
Crossed Tracks: Mesolimulus, Archaeopteryx, And The Nature Of Fossils, Leonard Finkelman
Faculty Publications
Organisms leave a variety of traces in the fossil record. Among these traces, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists conventionally recognize a distinction between the remains of an organism’s phenotype (body fossils) and the remains of an organism’s life activities (trace fossils). The same convention recognizes body fossils as biological structures and trace fossils as geological objects. This convention explains some curious practices in the classification, as with the distinction between taxa for trace fossils and for tracemakers. I consider the distinction between “parallel taxonomies,” or parataxonomies, which privileges some kinds of fossil taxa as “natural” and others as “artificial.” The motivations …