As we continue on with our primate conservation course, the next topic that we are going to be addressing is primate taxonomy. What I will say is that this is not a taxonomy course and primate taxonomy is an incredibly interesting and really diverse way of going about in classifying things. But we're going to just go through and give a little bit of background on it without getting too mired down in a lot of the details. So first we'll start off with this image from Fleagle and let's give a basic definition of taxonomy. So really we can say it is a means of ordering our knowledge of biological diversity through a series of commonly accepted names for organisms. So here we've got on this very simplified shared specializations and ancestral features cladogram. So that's what this kind of figure is, it's a cladogram. It's a visual representation of taxonomy or one of the variations on it. So we've got a lungfish, so no hair, has a tail. We have crocodiles, so no hair, also has a tail. Then we get this node right here where there's this evolution of hair. From there we have monkeys which have hair and a tail. We move up further, so a loss of a tail, which is how you define an ape. So hair and no tail, and then human, hair and no tail. So you can see each one of these, it shows that we share a common evolutionary ancestor with some of these creatures. But we have these variations, we've got these ways of ordering. So if we actually go ahead and look at a classification scheme, we generally go from specifics of the species to general, which is the kingdom with many levels in between. So the important thing is that each can be diagnosed by traits distinguishing it from other groups of the same rank. So let's go ahead and let's look at humans for example. So if we start off, we've got Kingdom Animalia, so it's comprised of multi-celled organisms which developed from an embryo resulting from the fertilization of an egg by a much smaller sperm. We can move down to our phylum, which is going to be Chordata, and the subphylum Vertebrata, class Mammalia. So this is where we get all of our mammals. Infraclass Eutherians, order Primates, suborder Haplorrhini, superfamily Hominoidea, and so that you've got oidea has been underlying there, whenever you see that ending for the word, that's means that we're talking about a superfamily. For family, it's Hominidae, so the I-D-A-E. Genus Homo and species Homo sapiens. So you can see that the genus name is going to be capitalized, it's going to be written with italics. The species name is always going to be lowercase, and this is again written completely in italics, Homo sapiens. The focus of this course, we're really going to be drilling down specifically and looking at primates, obviously. Wanted to break out the order primates a little bit for you, and I don't want you feeling like the ring tail over here. We will go off and we'll start with the first division of the order Primates. So we've got the suborders Strepsirrhini and Haplorrhini. So Strepsirrhini are going to be the, essentially think of it as the wet nosed primates, and Haplorrhini are going to be the dry nosed primates. So we are one of the dry nosed primates. So we've got our primate ancestors. The first thing that had this suite of characteristics that defined it as a primate as opposed to being anything else. We've got our lemurs and lorises, so our Strepsirrhini, this ring-tailed lemur is definitely one of our Strepsirrhini. We've got our tarsiers, which we'll meet a little bit later. Super, super fun, funky creatures. There was some debate and sometimes you still see this coming up where instead of having a Strepsirrhini Haplorrhini divide, people talk about a pro Simeon or an anthropoid divide. This is where we're going to be focusing more on the genetics of it, we'll really stick with the Strepsirrhini Haplorrhini division. So as the rest of it bills out across there, we've got our New World monkeys, we've got our Old World monkeys, gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzee, and hominids. So our closest living relatives are chimpanzees and bonobos. But the way this all structured out, we've got all of our Catarrhini. So Catarrhini is Old World monkeys, apes, and humans. Then we've got our Platyrrhini, so the New World monkeys. Again, if we further drill this in, we can have Hominidiae. That's going to be all the things that are more closely related. Again, if we're looking at that node point, it's going to be the node distribution between the Gibbons and everything to the right and the Old World Monkeys. Monophyly; so belonging to a monophyletic group. How that's defined is a taxonomic group that has a single common ancestor and includes all descendants of that ancestor defined by diagnostic traits. So we look at some of these diagnostic traits, we can say four facing eyes with stereoscopic vision, we've got nails instead of craws, we've got a petrosal auditory bulla. That's in the ear one bone forms this auditory bulla; this inflation of bone within there but these are the diagnostic traits or some of the diagnostic traits that define primates. As we start to go through the course and really starting to address individuals and species level things, we can talk about this idea of an adaptive radiation. So here we've got a smaller strip time, one of our lemurs. We've got a gorilla and we've got a Tompkins dominoes monkey. For this idea of an adaptive radiation; it's a group of closely related organisms that have evolved morphological and behavioral features enabling them to exploit different ecological niches. So these guys are all primates but they all live in different habitats and they'll exploit their habitats in different manners. So one of my early props really say how did they go about getting their groceries, how do they make their living? These division and separations is an outcome of natural selection and it's always that exciting mechanism of evolution defined and described by Charles Darwin. So how do you go about defining the adaptive radiation of a group of animals? So there's a number of factors and these factors also greatly influence species conservation issues and species conservation plans. So we can look at body size. Is this a very small creature? If you recall from one of the earlier lectures, so we've got mouse lemurs maturing about 100 grams all the way to gorillas which are a couple 100 pounds or a couple 100 kilograms. Body size can really play into where the animal can move around, what sub streets the animals can use. So if we look at some of these baboons in the picture here, they're moving around on a tree branch, which is a pretty substantial branch right there. If they try to move around on a smaller twig, they're most likely going to break that. Diet. What is the animal eating? Does the animal eats just leaves in general? Does the animal only eat insects, does the animal eat fruits? What happens when those fruits aren't in season? So there's a number of questions that can be really tied into diet. Locomotion. How does the animal actually get around? Are they habitual quadrupeds? So they walk on forelimbs. So think about squirrels or dogs or these baboons here. Those would be examples of quadrupeds, four-foot. Are they non habitual bipeds? Sometimes Gibbons, when they come down to the ground or up on tree tops or tree branches, they'll walk bipedally, much in the same way that humans walk bipedally. You've got some creatures that will swing through the trees, you've got some creatures that'll hang. So all these locomotor patterns will help to dictate how they move around their forest and where they move around their forest. Social organizations. Are the creatures extremely gregarious and hang out in very large groups? Are the animals solitary and only hang out with, for females, the mom and then the offspring. So it's how do the animals actually maneuver around through their environment and what kind of organization systems do they really have? There's a number of different primates systems that exist. Habitat preference. If we talk about macaques, macaques are known to easily move about and visit many different types of environments so think about long-term macaques or rhesus macaques, they're extremely adaptable to different habitats. Other species can only exist in very small habitats or very specific habitats and as soon as those habitats start to change, we start to ferry extinction crises. Another example that we have here in Colorado are the pecos. Little tiny kind of rodents that live up in higher altitude. As the environment is getting warmer around them, they [inaudible] to move higher and higher up the mountain in order to maintain this habitat. It becomes almost this kind of an island system, an island biogeography of where creatures can live. Again, if we go back to this, if an animal has a very strong habitat preference, then there can be serious concerns and issues when that habitat is destroyed. We'll discuss these features within the context of classification and geographic occurrence. So looking at all these variations to really kind of better understand and explain how and why the animals do what they do. We'll go ahead and close our taxonomy for right there. It's something that comes back over and over again so I wanted to give a brief taste of it. Our next video we're going to be talking about primate locations and primate habitats. So look forward to moving out with you guys.
