Grantee Spotlight: Thierra Nalley
The next grantee from our spring 2015 cycle is Thierra Nalley from the California Academy of Sciences. Her project is entitled “Ontogeny of the thoracolumbar transition in extant hominoids and Australopithecus.”
Thierra Nalley and a digital reconstruction of the fossil hominin DIK 1-1
Walking on two legs, or bipedalism, is a hallmark adaptation of the human lineage. A requirement for
Grantee Spotlight: Karline R. L. Janmaat
Introducing Karline Janmaat from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology. She was awarded a Leakey Foundation research grant in our spring 2015 cycle for her project entitled “The ecological intelligence of human rainforest foragers.”
Karline Janmaat. Photo credit: Bill Loubelo
Many primates have developed mental abilities that help them keep track of when and where energy-rich foods such as
Male rank, not paternity, predicts male–immature relationships in mountain gorillas
Stacy Rosenbaum (University of California at Los Angeles) was awarded a Leakey Foundation research grant in 2010 for her project entitled “Male-immature relationships in the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei).” Dr. Rosenbaum and her team were recently published in the journal Animal Behaviour, and she was kind enough to provide us with a brief summary of the article.
Copyright: Dian Fossey
Grantee Spotlight: Gabrielle Russo
The next spring 2015 Leakey Foundation grantee we would like to introduce you to is Gabrielle Russo from Stony Brook University. Her project is entitled “Elucidating the evolutionary pathways of hominin basicranial morphology using a formal phylogenetic comparative primate approach.”
Gabrielle Russo (R) and collaborator Jeroen B. Smaers
The morphology of the basicranium (base of the skull) in modern humans
Journal Article: There Is More than One Way to Crack an Oyster: Identifying Variation in Burmese Long-Tailed Macaque (Macaca fascicularis aurea) Stone-Tool Use
Amanda Tan is a PhD candidate at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She was awarded a Leakey Foundation research grant in the spring of 2013. Here is a summary of her team’s recent paper in PLOS ONE.
Researchers Catalog Variation in Stone-Tool Use by Burmese Long-Tailed Macaques
Burmese long-tailed macaques living on islands in southern Thailand use 17 different action