data

Alex Duncan (aduncan@mail.utexas.edu)
27 Jul 1995 04:40:29 GMT

Harry,

Here's a real quick and dirty data set. It doesn't resolve the
Pongo-Siva-Giganto issue. But, I haven't included body mass as a
character, nor sexual dimorphism (until Sivapithecine taxonomy is worked
out I think this is problematic).

What do you think? What data would you change/add to resolve this? I'm
not sure about some things (enamel thickness in Proconsul, ANCESTOR).
Also some features are difficult to sort out for Proconsul depending on
what reconstruction you like. For instance, is the interorbital distance
small? Absolutely, yes. But, when scaled for body size, probably not.
How 'bout supraorbital torus? Its not there at all in Proconsul
africanus (hesloni?), but this may be another phenomenon of body size.
Most big primates seem to develop a torus of some sort (even Pongo's
supraorbital rim is a more impressive structure than what we see in
Proconsul). Airorynchy/klinorynchy is another problematic character in
smaller primates. I've seen a paper (Shea, I think) demonstrating that
Hylobates has an extremely airorynch cranium, but you wouldn't know it to
look at it (at least I wouldn't). Where does that leave us with
Proconsul and Aegyptopithecus? They both look kind of airorynch to me,
but I think this is a characer that really needs to be quantified somehow.

ANCESTOR is sort of a made up dude, combining characters from Proconsul
and Aegyptopithecus.

#NEXUS

BEGIN DATA;
DIMENSIONS NTAX=7 NCHAR=9;
FORMAT MISSING=? GAP=- SYMBOLS= " 0 1 2";

CHARLABELS
[1] enamel [2] 'premax/palate' [3] orbits [4]
interorb_dist [5] canine_size
[6] cranium [7] supraorb_torus [8] up._incisor
[9] premax_suture
;
STATELABELS
1 thin medium thick,
2 primitive african asian,
3 rounded_rect. tall_oval,
4 wide narrow,
5 huge reduced,
6 klinorynch airorynch,
7 gracile robust,
8 homomorphic heteromorphic,
;

MATRIX
[ ]
[ ]

ANCESTOR ?0?00?0??
Australopith 210010101
Pan 010010101
Giganto 2???1????
Pongo 121111010
Proconsul 00000?01?
Siva 221111010
;
ENDBLOCK;

BEGIN ASSUMPTIONS;
OPTIONS DEFTYPE=unord PolyTcount=MINSTEPS ;

ENDBLOCK;

BEGIN TREES;

TRANSLATE
1 ANCESTOR,
2 Australopith,
3 Pan,
4 Giganto,
5 Pongo,
6 Proconsul,
7 Siva
;

Alex Duncan
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1086
512-471-4206
aduncan@mail.utexas.edu