Articlebronze2004

Comparative morphology of the eye in primates

173 citations0/0 files storedThe Anatomical Record Part A Discoveries in Molecular Cellular and Evolutionary Biology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Primate Behavior and Ecology Evolution and Paleontology Studies Comparative Animal Anatomy Studies

Abstract

Comparative studies of mammalian eye morphology have shown that relative cornea size is an important correlate of visual ecology. Nocturnal species tend to have large corneas relative to eye size as an adaptation for increasing visual sensitivity. By contrast, diurnal species tend to have smaller corneas relative to eye size because their eye morphology maximizes visual acuity. Although qualitative analyses suggest that activity pattern may have a similar influence on eye morphology in primates, various current hypotheses have proposed that either diurnal anthropoids or diurnal lemurs have visual systems that diverge from those of other diurnal mammals. The goal of this analysis is to quantify the relationship between eye morphology and activity pattern in primates and to determine whether primates exhibit variation in eye morphology comparable to that of other mammals. Data on eye size and cornea size were collected for 147 specimens of 55 primate species. These data reveal that, within primate suborders, diurnal species have significantly smaller relative cornea sizes than nocturnal or cathemeral species. Both haplorhines and strepsirrhines thus exhibit variation in eye morphology that is consistent with functional expectations. However, comparisons between the two primate suborders demonstrate that haplorhines and strepsirrhines differ significantly in eye morphology. Whereas strepsirrhines have relative cornea sizes that are similar to nonprimate mammals of comparable activity pattern, diurnal anthropoids have smaller relative cornea sizes than most nonprimate mammals. This derived eye morphology in anthropoids probably evolved in the anthropoid stem lineage as a result of selection for highly acute diurnal vision.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 173 citations exist upstream.

References

2000Osteological evidence for the evolution of activity pattern and visual acuity in primates 2004The Evolution of High Visual Acuity in the Anthropoidea 1940The size of the orbit and of the eye in primates 1996The Social Systems of Gregarious Lemurs: Lack of Convergence with Anthropoids due to Evolutionary Disequilibrium?1979Olfactory Communication in Prosimians

Cited by

2006Effects of activity pattern on eye size and orbital aperture size in primates 2007Sensory Basis of Food Detection in Wild Microcebus murinus 2015Evolving through day and night: origin and diversification of activity pattern in modern primates 2006Eye Morphology in Cathemeral Lemurids and Other Mammals 2007The sensory basis of prey detection in captive-born grey mouse lemurs, Microcebus murinus 2008Diurnality, nocturnality, and the evolution of primate visual systems 2015Cathemerality in a small, folivorous primate: proximate control of diel activity in Hapalemur meridionalis 2009Visual acuity in the cathemeral strepsirrhine Eulemur macaco flavifrons

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.