Part One: Doboth 1 & 2 below IN ORDER(in other words, do Part One first, then do Part Two):

1) Primate Selection:Scroll down, look at the images of primates below and select ONE.

AND:

2) Primate Identification:Click "Reply" and submit a post that includesall threeof the following:

1. Using the traits for each type of non-human primate listed on theIntro to the Primates slides, identify theType of Primate you see in the photo:Prosimian,New World monkey,Old World monkeyorApe.-- I'm not looking for the primate's species or common name, so DO NOT do a reverse image search. You simply need to look at the primate's traits that are visible in the photo and see if you can determine what type of primate it is.
2. Discuss as many traits as you see in the photothat helped you identify the type of primate it is. DON'T discuss general traits that all primates possess (e.g. forward-facing eyes, opposable thumb), but rather look for the distinguishing traits that reveal the type of primate you see in the photo and that make it unique from the other three types of primates (for example, if you think it's an ape, which of its traits helped you identify it as an ape and distinguish it from the other types of primates?).And please DON'T discuss traits that you can't see in the photo.
3. Identify whether the traits you observed and used to identify the primate areancestral (inherited from common ancestors they share with other mammals), orderived(traits that are unique to this type of primate) andprovide a brief explanation that demonstrates your understanding of these concepts.If necessary, review these concepts from the Unit 5Biological Classification slides.

Primate 9:

Part 2 do primate 6

You may ONLY use class sources for this assignment (e.g. those in the Unit 7 module) and NO extraneous details are permitted in your answer (in other words, stick to identifying the primate as outlined above and don't provide additional, unrelated details)

These are transcripts from module 7

Transcript 1

Primate characteristics. Two of the characteristics that really set primates apart from other mammals are they have superb climbing abilities. They're not the only mammals that climb, but most mammals don't. Most mammals don't have the ability to climb. And having the opposable thumb and grasping hands, of course. And also non-human primates have grasping feet. It makes them really well suited to living in trees and to climb. And then the stereoscopic vision refers to the fact that the eyes are at the front of the face. In other mammals, even something like a predator. Like a wolf. The eyes are somewhat forward facing. And something like a dog, too. You can see they're kind of forward facing, right, but they their field of vision. It's a little bit different. They don't have overlapping vision in the front. Only the primates do. So because our eyes are situated at the front of the face, we can look at something right in front of us. And we have this overlapping vision that's part of stereoscopic vision because it's both sides. Both hemispheres of the brain also communicate with each other to allow for this and also the depth perception. Well, we can estimate, you know, how far something is from us because both of our eyes can focus on it. So that's part of it too. So the arboreal hypothesis was first introduced, I believe, in the 1920s, if I remember correctly, both of these hypotheses attempt to explain basically why it is that primates evolved these traits. This is a drawing of a very old primate from China that was discovered a few years back, about 55 million years old. We obviously just have it's fossilized bones, but this is an artist's rendition of what it may have looked like. And very clearly from that very, very old primate, very early primate, we can see that it had the same kinds of traits that today's primates have. Also, ankle and wrist joints that are very flexible, that allow for climbing as well. But the arboreal hypothesis says that the grasping hands, of course, opposable thumb is part of that. The mobile digits, rather than having a, you know, stiff claw and shortened, digits. Also the depth perception that this evolved for a tree dwelling lifestyle. But that was the main, I guess you could say evolutionary or the main force behind the evolutionary change was the, you know, adaptations were for living in trees. But this was challenged, though, when other researchers later, I think in the 1960s and 70s, were really pointing out that while there are other mammals that also do this, like squirrels, for example, they may not have exactly grasping hands and opposable thumb like primates have, but they do have the ability to grab a bit, certainly more than the paws of most mammals do. But to say that this suite of characteristics only evolved to allow for tree dwelling or arboreal lifestyle wasn't really enough. So the visual predation hypothesis really replaced the arboreal hypothesis that depth perception, forward facing eyes, the grasping hands, that these were all actually early on selected for. So natural selection took care of this basically because it allowed early primates to catch prey and that, you know, allowing them to live in trees was kind of maybe more secondary. And you see that early primates like this little guy here and there are some monkeys today which are also very small, especially New World monkeys. Not all of them are insectivores, but the earliest primates, not just this one from 55 million years ago, but others too. Based on their dentition and their teeth, we can see that they were eating insects, that little sharp ridges on their teeth that they would be biting into, like the hard exoskeletons of of insects. And some monkeys today have retained that they will catch insects, and we have like a fly or little net or something flying in front of them, and they're able to catch it. Right. You can't do that and catch it if you don't have the grasping hands, or you don't have depth perception, you wouldn't be able to do that. So it's thought that that was that's the more likely explanation for why this first evolved, allowed for this kind of lifestyle. And then evolution, of course, took over from there. Some primates, some small primates are still insectivorous today. Others became folivores, eating mostly leaves. Others are frugivorous, eating fruits mainly. Others are omnivorous, eating a variety of things, including insects. So it says here these traits make non-human primates very well suited to an arboreal lifestyle, but didn't likely evolve just for that reason. That was maybe more of a secondary reason.

Transcript 2

I think in most cases, students find the part of, find this part of the lecture the most difficult, and rightly so. You have all these weird Latin names that are thrown at you, but you've got the order, Primates. In chapter five, you learned about the seven levels of classification, and this one did not come up. Right? But there are more than just kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. You were introduced to the concept of sub phylum like the vertebrates, right? It's a type of caudate underneath the phylum, Chordata. But you also have sub orders and infer orders and super families and all these other classifications. Keep in mind that classification early on under Linnaeus started just as a means of kind of trying to figure out how nature was put together. In fact, Linnaeus Carolus Linnaeus of the 1700s, of course, was a naturalist who did not accept evolution. No one who discovered evolution at that point. So he was using a religious interpretation and felt that that what he was doing was trying to figure out how God had designed all living things. But the way that he grouped organisms together, like he put all the primates, persimmons, monkeys, apes, humans in the same group. No one had ever done that before. But he said, look, God designed them in similar ways. They all have forward facing eyes and a large brain and these small hands. It turns out that primates had all those characteristics because of a shared evolutionary history. Not you know, we don't believe today that it was a creator that did that, but that other groups of animals to the order that includes the carnivores, for example, the the meat eating mammals, they all have shared characteristics that, you know, derived characteristics that evolved in that group. And so what I'm talking about here are the derived characteristics that evolved in primates. And there are different kinds of primates. So that went down different evolutionary paths. So you have the one group that includes the prosimians called Strepsirhini. I don't know why some taxonomists early on decided to to use this "rhini", just like rhino and rhinoceros is the Latin word for nose. So for some reason they decided to focus on that. But "strep" means wet. So these are the wet nosed primates. Lemurs, lorises, bush babies, like other mammals, have wet noses. Dogs do too. If you've had a dog, you know that they have that wet, cold nose. It aids in the sense of smell. So that's an ancestral trait that that prosimians still have. And then "haplo" actually means dry. So the dry nose primates are both types of monkeys, apes and humans, but also the tarsier, this funky little looking primate. Here, your book talks about the fact that at one time, tarsiers were placed in a category with other prosimians. But once we started using DNA samples to also consider evolutionary history. So we look at bones, obviously from modern day animals and fossil animals too, or fossil specimens. We look at things like shared characteristics of the cranium, teeth, you know, shape, the cranium, size of the cranium, things like that. And then other skeletal features of the body, but also DNA and DNA can actually sometimes be a bit more precise. DNA evidence in recent years has shown us that the tarsier is actually more closely related to monkeys, apes and humans. So that's why it's placed in this group with us, even though it doesn't look anything like us. Now, it does have some prosimian like characteristics. It's got those really long hind limbs for jumping and leaping and practicing what we call vertical clinging and leaping right where it's vertically hanging on here to this branch, and then it leaps to another one, or leaps to the ground to catch insects and then leaps back up. That's a simian characteristic, as are the large eyes for seeing at night, though these are really large, really exaggerated. One tarsier eyeball is the size of their brains that have this huge eyes and many, or I should say, the other prosimians also are nocturnal. They have a layer behind the retina of the eye that allows them to capture more, more light and see at night. But they've got some things that are clearly not like prosimians. They actually have a lot less pragmatism than the persimmons do. Very flat faced. And this upper lip that's separated. It's not attached to the gums. The same thing that we have and that that monkeys and apes have. Right. You can see sometimes apes that will threaten each other by putting their tongue under their upper lip, like something like that. Other persimmons and other mammals can't do that. They actually have. The upper lip is split here, and it's in two, and it's attached to the gum, so it's different. And prosimians have some traits that are all their own. Cervical or neck vertebrae that allow them to rotate their heads 180 degrees. So that's a. I've trained for them. But basically this approach that you see here, lumping tarsiers in the same group with monkeys, apes and humans is because genetically they're more similar to us. So we look at them as having a closer evolutionary history to us. All these primates share a common ancestral species and evolve from the same source. But when we use more specific groupings like suborder or infraorder, we're much more specific than in how we look at those relationships. So here you got a list of characteristics which I wouldn't worry about memorizing all of this. That's not necessary. Just use the information on the lecture slides about the different non-human primates. And You don't need to worry about the tarsiers, but I have this in here just so you can kind of see how they're all related. So here you've got the suborder, Haplorhini, which is further divided into different infraorders. So every time you go further down this hierarchy in biological classification, it's grouping organisms together in a, in a narrower way, in a sense where there's smaller and smaller groups versus the order, primates, which is a really large broad group, something like the infraorder, Catarrhini, only includes very specific primates: The Old World monkeys, apes and humans. And they're classified in here with us because they share more in common with us. If you look at Old World Monkey Teeth, they're more like us. Some of the other characteristics two of the cranium, even their their physiology, you know, we look at how long females are pregnant. It's extended in these kinds of primates, more or most in the human, of course, but still we see a lot of similar characteristics. So genetically too, Old World monkeys, like a baboon show a higher degree of similarities in their DNA basis with us than, say, the New World monkeys like a spider monkey. And then, this is also a name referring to the nostril shaped flat nosed versus narrow nosed. Not anything you need to know for the exam, but just understand the logic behind this or the super family that you have here. This is the apes and humans. Apes are even more closely related to us than all world monkeys are, and we can see that again in things like their teeth, the length of time of gestation during a time that a female's pregnant, even those things like extended developmental phases. Apes go through an infant stage and a juvenile stage, for example, before they become sub-adults and adults. So on your study guide. You'll only notice that you need to be familiar with the groups, Strepsirhini, Haplorhini, Platyrrhini, Catarrhini, and Hominoidea. Don't worry about the old World monkey super family or the tarsier infraorder and you don't need to memorize all these traits. I just want you to know who is or which types of primates are classified in these different groups. And then later, when we get to chapter ten, we'll take a look at this group in more detail. The family hominoidea includes just the African great apes and humans, because African great apes genetically are even more similar to us than the Asian great apes are like orangutans. And then we'll even look further down at the tribe, as it's called, that we are classified in, which only includes humans and human ancestors like Neanderthals and Homo erectus and things like that. But I just want you to understand the logic behind this, which is also something you can see in this family tree. So you go way back at the, you know, earliest evolutionary evidence in the fossil record of primates after dinosaurs went extinct. That's when we saw the first primates evolved from early mammals. And you see that all the primates, all these different lineages of today, all have a connection going back this far. And then you see, in more recent times, it's still not very recent. And we were talking like 50 million years ago, but that's more recent than, say, 65 million years ago. Yeah. The branching off events that led to the line that that evolved into today's tarsiers. The one that led to the different monkeys, apes and humans, for example. And then you've got this splitting off event here, which happened some 30 million years ago or so. That might be different. The newer monkeys evolving some differences. And Old World monkeys here lost common ancestral, ancestral species some 22 million years ago that that led to these, you know, the Old World monkeys, apes, and humans. So what these different branching off events are showing us is that the further back in time they happened, the less closely related these species are. So going back to this time period, New World monkeys had more time to evolve differences. And so they do shared evolutionary history with us. But they're a little bit different in terms of their teeth and genetics and other traits making the Old World monkeys more similar to us because they share a more recent common ancestor with us or the apes are even more similar to us, because the last common ancestor we share with them is even more recent. And African great apes like gorillas and especially chimps of bonobos, even more similar to humans because the last common ancestor we share was more recent. So I hope that makes sense. That's what I what I want you to understand when I say the logic behind classification, because the way that we classify them into groups reflects this evolutionary or family tree that you see here.

The answers should look something like this Part One

Primate 8

A : Prosimian

B : large eyes, small body size, long fingers and toes, large ears and snout.

C : primate 8, prosimian, has large eyes for nocturnal vision and long snout for smell, which are ancestral traits from early mammal ancestors. It also has long fingers and toes for adopting to life in trees, which are derived traits evolved in early primates.