Chapter 8

Question 1

strepsirhines

Answer 1

members of the primate suborder Strepsirhini, which includes lemurs and lorises

Question 2

haplorhines

Answer 2

members of the primate suborder Haplorhini, which includes tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and humans

Question 3

derived

Answer 3

being or having a feature that is not present in the ancestral form

Question 4

orthograde

Answer 4

referring to an upright body position; this term relates to the position of the head and torso during sitting, climbing, etc., and doesn’t necessarily mean that an animal is bipedal

Question 5

superorder

Answer 5

a taxonomic group ranking above an order and below a class or subclass

Question 6

sister groups

Answer 6

the relationship of new clades that result from the splitting of a single common lineage

Question 7

last common ancestor (LCA)

Answer 7

the final evolutionary link between two related groups

Question 8

crown group

Answer 8

all of the taxa that come after a major speciation event; easier to identify than stem groups because the members possess the clade’s shared derived traits

Question 9

taxa

Answer 9

(singular taxon); a taxonomic group of any rank (e.g., species, family, or class)

Question 10

stem group

Answer 10

all of the taxa in a clade before a major speciation event; often difficult to recognize in the fossil record since they don’t often have the shared derived traits found in the crown group

Question 11

semiorder

Answer 11

the taxonomic category above suborder and below order

Question 12

euprimates

Answer 12

“true primates”; term coined by Elwyn Simons in 1972

Question 13

postcranial

Answer 13

referring to all or part of the skeleton not including the skull; the term originates from the fact that in quadrupeds the body is posterior to the head; the term literally means “behind the head”

Question 14

subfossil

Answer 14

bone not old enough to have become completely mineralized as a fossil

Question 15

bilophodont

Answer 15

referring to molars that have four cusps oriented in two parallel rows, resembling ridges, or “lophs”; this trait is characteristic of Old World monkeys

Question 16

paleoprimatologists

Answer 16

anthropologists specializing in the study of the nonhuman primate fossil record

Question 17

biostratigraphic/faunal correlation

Answer 17

a method of dating strata that relates the fossil content of an unknown stratum to a like one that has been securely chronometrically dated

Question 18

catarrhine

Answer 18

member of Catarrhini, a parvorder of Primates, one of the three major divisions of the suborder Haplorhini; contains the Old World monkeys, apes, and humans

Question 19

platyrrhines

Answer 19

members of Platyrrhini, a parvorder of Primates, one of the three major divisions of the suborder Haplorhini; include only New World monkeys

Question 20

parvorder

Answer 20

a taxonomic group below infraorder

Question 21

island hopping

Answer 21

traveling from one island to the next

Question 22

Y-5 molar

Answer 22

molar that has five cusps with grooves running between them, forming a Y shape; characteristic of hominoids

Question 23

zygomatics

Answer 23

cheekbones

Question 24

terrestrial

Answer 24

living and locomoting primarily on the ground