Mouse lemurs are a small in size species, they live in the forest of northern and eastern Madagascar, where there is over 100 different kinds of lemurs. This primates are small, which can be reflected in their dentition, their mandible and occlusal are only 5 cm. So you can get an idea of how tiny this animals really are. This is an adaptation for their diet. They don’t need a big mouth or teeth since they mostly feed out of fruit, flowers and leaves that they find in the forest. Because the weather on Madagascar is always changing, the mouse lemur keeps fat storage on their tails for when the temperatures decrease.
Chimpanzee:
The Chimpanzees don’t have a specific habitat or environment, they can be found in many places of Africa. Their ancestors are the great apes and their evolution has happen to they can adjust to the forever evolving environment they are exposed to. Their mandible it’s about 3.25 cm, while the mandibular definition is of 1.75 cm. The chimpanzee often feed of vegetation or meat. 
Baboon:
The baboon lives in the woodland savannas of Africa. This animals posses a mandible of 4 cm and a mandibular definition of labial and occlusal of 10 mm and a buccal of 2 cm, that come in play when they hunt smaller animals as part of their diet, but the also ate vegetation, they are polygamous and in some cases they can be in groups of up to 30 individuals.
Gibbon:
The gibbons are asian apes, they are arboreal apes, which explains their long and strong arms. The gibbons have a mandible that can run from their caudal of 2.5 cm, clorsal of 1.75 cm, lateral 2.cm and a ventral of 1.75 cm. Their body is adapted to their environmental, always up in trees which also reflects their diet. They are omnivores. 
Spider Monkey:
The spider monkey live in an environment of tropical rain forest, usually from the regions of Central, and South America, they have an small face and mouth, they are omnivores.
What has come to my attention is how the environment affects the body size and diet of this primates. For the general part they were all in a vegetarian diet, which explains why most of this primates don't have big teeth. And the ones that do eat meat or hunt, are the ones with the bigger and stronger bodies. This primates live in a tropical forest or dry lands where there are trees. Hence they're long arms and their tails. This was something really interesting to learn, I learned about the dimensions of the mandible of most of this animals, which surprisingly enough the dimensions weren't that much different from each other. And either was the shape. The trait all of this primates share is one that has being passed down to each other as their time proceeds.
I actually like that you chose to used skulls for this topic instead of living primates. It is easier to study dentition from a skull without the soft tissue getting in the way.
ReplyDeleteJust a general statement: Size of a mouth or teeth is just an incidental result of the size of the primate. This isn't a direct influence of the environment, though the body size is related to that. But what about the dental formula and the tooth morphology (shape) of each of these primates? This was the information that should have been included for each primate. You did a good job with your general descriptions but we needed more information on the teeth themselves. That would have made it easier for you to draw connections between dentition and the environmental influences such as diet.
Dentition involves tooth number but it is also about tooth morphology, or tooth shape, in particularly in the premolars and molars with their cusp shape. You can have shearing cusps for plant material, piercing cusps for insectivores and crushing/grinding cusps to generalized vegetarians. You discuss the differences in diet between all of these primates. It would have been interesting for you to identify how the teeth reflect these different diets as well for a complete comparative picture.
For your summary, you focus the pattern of body size and tooth size, but this is not unexpected. Body size is not an "environment" that might affect dentition. That is just a physiological relationship. Looking at tooth number and tooth shape, and then looking to see if there is a relationship between those patterns and diet (or even defense, such as in the case of the large canines on baboons) would have been the approach to take here.
Thanks for sharing your post on dentition patterns with these primates. I can tell that you put some good thought into each section of this assignment.
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