Science

The digital curation of MOP's unique skeletal collections will ultimately enable students and researchers to conduct many cross-species studies pertaining to functional morphology, osteology, and osteological pathology. Examples of questions which can be investigated include: 1) Which skeletal traits are uniquely human? 2) Are there functional and phylogenetic bases for anatomical variations across primate species? 3) What are the evolutionary processes underlying the anatomical patterns of the great apes? These and other research projects can now get underway, thanks to the valuable comparative data that the Museum of Primatology provides.

The 2D and 3D digital products contained within MOP's data repository will enable students and researchers to make biometric, density, and other measurements using modern numerical techniques and tools in order to perform both comparative analysis across specimens as well as between species.

Morphometric Analysis Enables the comparison of biometric features between specimens.	Bone Density Histogram and Transfer Function Enables comparisons of cortical and trabecular bone.