Craniodental Variation of Macaques (Macaca):Size,Function and Phylogeny

In order to analyze skull variation in the genus Macaca,seventy-seven craniodental variables were taken from eleven species.They were first defined seven functional units comprising three anatomical regions.Twenty-seven variables were finally selected to carry out the morphology of the whole skull.The data,organized in these ways,were examined to discover variations between and within the various species.The methods used were Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA).PCAs of the functional units anatomical regions,and the whole skull provided similar,though not identical,separations of species clusters in both sexes separately.These differences in structure could be related to size,sexual dimorphism,diet,ecology,classification and phylogeny.The question of size should have been easy to settle.Unfortunately,this is not the case.In this study where the raw data are measurements of the specimens,the main differences should be size.However,the size differences seem to occur in both the first and second (independent) multivariate axes.In some analyses the size differences between the species are biggest and appear in the first axis.In other analyses it is the separation between the sexes (and these too are largely size) that are the biggest and appear in the first axis.Yet in other analyses,both of these size separations,though still orthogonal to one another,present in the combination of the first two axes.This certainly implies that a single axis of body size is not present and that shape differences have not been isolated form size differences.It also implies that sexual dimorphism is a complex matter.As a result,the question of the relationships between the species is therefore also complex.One cluster of species that includes M.fascicularis,M.sinica and M.radiata was significantly isolated from all others regardless of level of analysis.This relationship is quite different from that proposed on the anatomy of the reproductive organs (Delson,1980;Fooden,1976,1980).