ANT 3514C – Introduction To Biological Anthropology Lab 6: Primate Anatomy & Taxonomy

Name: ______________________________________  Section: ___________ 

ANT 3514C – Introduction to Biological Anthropology 

Lab 6: Primate Anatomy & Taxonomy 

Lab Objectives: 

• Evaluate the dental formula of an unknown primate and place it within a major clade 

• Interpret the difference between gradistic and cladistic methods of grouping primates 

• Identify the anatomical synapomorphies that distinguish the major primate clades 

• Draw a cladogram to illustrate the modern, broadly-accepted primate phylogeny 

Purpose: To examine the skeletal traits that distinguish the major primate clades. 

The study of non-human primates has been recognized since ancient times as relevant to understanding human anatomy. This was perhaps best recognized by a wide audience of scholars for the first time in 1735 when Carolus Linnaeus, despite his strong creationist views, included humans with other apes and monkeys in the group Anthropomorpha. By the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae in 1758 he had abandoned this term and began calling the group by the familiar name we now use: Order Primates. Linnaeus was motivated to group humans with other primates because of the many anatomical similarities that he perceived uniting them. In modern biological terms, we now refer to these structures as synapomorphies, or ‘shared derived traits.’ For instance, all primates have a broad, flat nail on their big toe, which is a structure unlike any of the narrow claws found in other mammals. We use synapomorphies like these to reconstruct patterns of shared ancestry and build cladograms to better understand the pattern of primate evolution and where humans belong in it. This method of reconstructing relationships between taxa based on shared derived characteristics