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Head of Midas imperator now called Saguinus imperator - The emperor tamarin
Monkey from the Amazon Region Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1907)
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From Wood’s The Illustrated Natural History Vol. 1 (1859)
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Images of primates by Jordi Sabater Pi (1922-2009).
For more images see:
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Erratic Environment May Be Key to Human Evolution
by Charles Choi
At Olduvai Gorge, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment, researchers added.
Olduvai Gorge is a ravine cut into the eastern margin of the Serengeti Plain in northern Tanzania that holds fossils of hominins — members of the human lineage. Excavations at Olduvai Gorge by Louis and Mary Leakey in the mid-1950s helped to establish the African origin of humanity.
To learn more about the roots of humanity, scientists analyzed samples of leaf waxes preserved in lake sediments at Olduvai Gorge, identifying which plants dominated the local environment around 2 million years ago. This was about when Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of modern humans who used relatively advanced stone tools, appeared.
“We looked at leaf waxes, because they’re tough, they survive well in the sediment,” researcher Katherine Freeman, a biogeochemist at Pennsylvania State University, said in a statement.
After four years of work, the researchers focused on carbon isotopes — atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons — in the samples, which can reveal what plants reigned over an area. The grasses that dominate savannas engage in a kind of photosynthesis that involves both normal carbon-12 and heavier carbon-13, while trees and shrubs rely on a kind of photosynthesis that prefers carbon-12. (Atoms of carbon-12 each possess six neutrons, while atoms of carbon-13 have seven.)…
(read more: Live Science) (image: NIcole Rager Fuller, NSF)
Posted on January 11, 2013 via fauna with 128 notes
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I hope you all had a fantastic 2012 and a wonderful New Year’s Eve. Words fail to summarize how transformative this past year has been for me personally; I’m simply awed by it. One of those “I never would have imagined” moments. Not that I want to really get into the nitty gritty, but at the very least I hope my friends and family know how incredibly grateful I am for their love and support and encouragement. And for you, too, followers: without your interest surely none of this would have happened— like, my grad school decision, the success of this blog, and certainly not the Brain Scoop (26,500 SUBSCRIBERS. ON THREE VIDEOS.) I am forever in your debt.
OKAY. I made it back to Missoula last night and I hope to get into the museum sometime tomorrow. For the record,
chrisperriman correctly identified the Freak of the Week from December 21st as being the tarsal (feet) bones of a penguin. More on that soon! The picture above of a tasier is one of the lantern slides I found a few weeks ago. I think it does an adequate job of detailing how excited I am for the coming months. -
Cercopithecus erythrogaster as Lasiopyga erythrogaster by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.
A review of the Primates,.
New York,American museum of natural history,1912..
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/40610139 -
The brown woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagotricha) by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.
A review of the Primates,.
New York,American museum of natural history,1912..
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/40609778 -
Lasiopyga by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.
A review of the Primates,.
New York,American museum of natural history,1912..
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/40610137 -
Cercopithecus moloney by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.
A review of the Primates,.
New York,American museum of natural history,1912..
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/40610230 -
GIGANTOPITHECUS, EXTINCT ASIAN APE:
1. Did Bigfoot Really Exist? How Gigantopithecus Became Extinct
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Yeti. The Abominable Snowman. Whatever you want to call it, such a giant, mythical ape is not real—at least, not anymore. But more than a million years ago, an ape as big as a polar bear lived in South Asia, until going extinct 300,000 years ago.
Scientists first learned of Gigantopithecus in 1935, when Ralph von Koenigswald, a German paleoanthropologist, walked into a pharmacy in Hong Kong and found an unusually large primate molar for sale.
Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/01/did-bigfoot-really-exist-how-gigantopithecus-became-extinct/#ixzz2EV4uJw4J
2. The Ape That Was:
For thousands of years, Chinese pharmacists have used fossils - which they call dragon teeth and dragon bones - as ingredients in potions intended to cure ailments ranging from backache to sexual impotence. The fossil-rich caves of southern China have been, and still are, sedulously mined by farmers, who sell these medicinal treasures to apothecaries in the cities. In just such a pharmacy, in Hong Kong in 1935, the German paleoanthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald came across a large fossil primate molar that did not belong to any known species…
read more: http://www.uiowa.edu/~bioanth/giganto.html
Posted on December 21, 2012 via fauna with 304 notes
