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Hylobatids (gibbons and siamangs) are the smallest of the apes distinguished by their coordinated duets, territorial songs, arm-swinging locomotion, and small family group sizes. Although they are the most speciose of the apes boasting twenty species living in eleven countries, ninety-five percent are critically endangered or endangered according to the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species. Despite this, gibbons are often referred to as being 'forgotten' in the shadow of their great ape cousins because comparably they receive less research, funding and conservation attention. This is only the third book since the 1980s devoted to gibbons, and presents cutting-edge research covering a wide variety of topics including hylobatid ecology, conservation, phylogenetics and taxonomy. Written by gibbon researchers and practitioners from across the world, the book discusses conservation challenges in the Anthropocene and presents practice-based approaches and strategies to save these singing, swinging apes from extinction.
In very general terms, "scaling" can be defined as the structural and func tional consequences of differences in size (or scale) among organisms of more or less similar design. Interest in certain aspects of body size and scaling in primate biology (e. g. , relative brain size) dates to the turn of the century, and scientific debate and dialogue on numerous aspects of this general subject have continued to be a primary concern of primatologists, physical an thropologists, and other vertebrate biologists up to the present. Indeed, the intensity and scope of such research on primates have grown enormously in the past decade or so. Information continues to accumulate rapidly from many different...
Summarizes the latest research findings on the biology of the sauropod dinosaurs, the largest land-living animals, and covers nutrition, physiology, skeletal structure, and growth.
This book discusses how and why animals evolved into particular shapes. The book identifies the physical laws which decide over the evolutionary (selective) value of body shape and morphological characters. Comparing the mechanical necessities with morphological details, the author attempts to understand how evolution works, and which sorts of limitations are set by selection. The book explains morphological traits in more biomechanical detail without getting lost in physics, or in methods. Most emphasis is placed on the proximate question, namely the identification of the mechanical stresses which must be sustained by the respective body parts, when they move the body or its parts against resistance. In the first part of the book the focus is on ‘primitive’ animals and later on the emphasis shifts to highly specialized mammals. Readers will learn more about living and fossil animals. A section of the book is dedicated to human evolution but not to produce another evolutionary tree, nor to refine a former one, but to contribute to answering the question: “WHY early humans have developed their particular body shape".
The hand commonly is considered to have exerted great influence on the evolution of typically human characteristics, like upright posture, stereoscopic vision, «manipulative» handling of parts of the environment. The German term «Begreifen», which is commonly used for the understanding of complex relationships in a generalised, abstract sense, always implies the original meaning of seizing objects with the aid of the hands. The hands are also of greatest importance for the survival of the other, non-human primates. Hands are absolutely essential for locomotion in an arboreal habitat, and the intake of food is dependant on the use of the hands as well: primates very rarely take in food di...
The history of eugenics and racial nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe is a neglected topic of analysis in contemporary scholarship. Moreover, national historiographies in Central and Southeast Europe have either marginalized eugenics and racial nationalism or deemed them incompatible with their respective national traditions. Accordingly, this volume has a two-fold ambition: to excavate the hitherto unknown eugenic movements in Central and Southeast Europe and to explain their relationship with racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. On the one hand, the historiographic perspective substantiated in this volume connects developments in the history of racial anthropology, genetics and eugenics with political ideologies such as racial nationalism and anti-Semitism; on the other hand, it contests the 'Sonderweg' approach adopted by scholars dealing these phenomena in Central and Southeast Europe by arguing that concerns with eugenics and race were as widely disseminated in these regions as they were in Western Europe and North America. Book jacket.
Contemporary research in the field of robotics attempts to harness the versatility and sustainability of living organisms with the hope of rendering a renewable, adaptable, and robust class of technology that can facilitate self-repairing, social, and moral--even conscious--machines. This landmark volume surveys this flourishing area of research.