The ontogeny of sexual dimorphism in the African apes

Abstract

The relationship between the growth spurt and the onset of sexual maturity is problematic in nonhuman primates. Growth data on the cranium and postcranium of dentally aged pygmy chimpanzees, common chimpanzees, and gorillas are reported here. In all three species, male means generally exceed female means throughout growth, with the exception that females exhibit a spurt during one dental-age stage when they become generally larger than the males. This female spurt occurs earlier in an absolute and relative sense in the gorillas than the chimpanzees. These growth data support field and laboratory observations suggesting that female gorillas become sexually mature earlier than do female chimpanzees. Gorillas are thus characterized by a greater degree of "sexual bimaturism" than are the chimpanzees. Implications of these differences in terms of size dimorphism, mating systems, and morphology are discussed.

Cite this work

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

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 75 citations exist upstream.

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