Daris R. Swindler - Böcker

Introduction to the Primates is a comprehensive but compact guide to the long evolutionary history of the world’s prosimians, monkeys, and apes, and to the much shorter history of humankind’s interactions with them, from our earliest recorded observations to the severe threats we now pose to their survival.Daris Swindler provides a detailed description of the major primate groups and their environments, from the smallest lemurs of Madagascar to the gorillas of central Africa. He compares and contrasts the primate species, looking at each with a specific anatomical focus. The range of diversity emerges as the particular characteristics of the species becomes increasingly distinct. Swindler also considers primate behavior and its close connections with environment and evolutionary differences. His account of 65 million years of successful adaptation and evolution demonstrates the drama of paleontology as evidence accrues and gaps in the history of primate evolution gradually close.

Primate dentitions vary widely both between genera and between species within a genus. This book is a comparative dental anatomy of the teeth of living non-human primates that brings together information from many disciplines to present the most useful and comprehensive database possible in one consolidated text. The core of the book consists of comparative morphological and metrical descriptions with analyses, reference tables and illustrations of the permanent dentitions of 85 living primate species to establish a baseline for future investigations. The book also includes information on dental microstructure and its importance in understanding taxonomic relationships between species, data on deciduous dentitions, prenatal dental development and ontogenetic processes, and material to aid age estimation and life history studies. Primate Dentition will be an important reference work for researchers in primatology, dental and physical anthropology, comparative anatomy and dentistry as well as vertebrate paleontology and veterinary science.