![]() ![]() ![]() Once the young hatch, they lap up milk produced from glands on the mother’s abdomen rather than latch onto nipples. Monotremes, which include echidnas and duck-billed platypuses, lay eggs rather than give birth to live young. Monotremes are the most primitive of the mammals, meaning they have retained more ancient traits than marsupials or placental mammals, and so, monotremes are characterized by some unusual traits. There are three types of mammals: monotremes, marsupials, and placental mammals. All members of this class share certain characteristics, including, among other things, having fur or hair, producing milk from mammary glands, and being warm-blooded. Primates are one of at least twenty Orders belonging to the Class Mammalia. In fact, acknowledgment of similarities between humans and non-humans dates back far earlier than Linnaeus (see the Special Topic box), yet it was only more recently that we attained the genetic data to back up our intuition. Linnaeus was wrong in including colugos (now in Order Dermoptera) and bats (now in Order Chiroptera), but the grouping of humans with the then-known non-human primates was significant in that by doing so Linnaeus formally recognized the affinities between humans and these non-human taxa. The term Order Primates dates back to 1758 when, in his tenth edition of Systema Naturae, Carolus Linnaeus put humans, “simia” (monkeys and apes), “lemurs” (lemurs and colugos), and some bats into one of eight groups of mammals. Here, we focus on the organization and diversity within the Order Primates. In Chapter 2, you learned about the nature of Linnaean classification, the system we use for organizing life-forms. Because humans are primates, we share a wide range of behavioral and morphological traits with the other species who also fall into this group. You may be wondering why a field dedicated to the study of humans would include the study of non-human animals. What people probably mean when they say “monkey” is actually “primate,” a term that refers to all organisms classified within the Order Primates and also the subject of this chapter. What strikes me as significant is that, although most people do not know the difference between a monkey, an ape, and a lemur, they nonetheless recognize something in the animals as being similar to themselves. I have very often heard a parent and child walk up to a chimpanzee enclosure and exclaim “Look at the monkeys!” The parent and child often don’t know that a chimpanzee is not a monkey, nor are they likely to know that chimpanzees share more than 98% of their DNA with us. What I also find interesting is watching people watch primates. One of the best parts of teaching anthropology for me is getting to spend time at zoos watching primates. Understand your place in nature by learning your taxonomic classification.Describe the major primate taxa using their key characteristics.Identify different types of traits that we use to evaluate primate taxa.Understand how studying non-human primates is important in anthropology.Learn how primates are different from other mammals. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |