Primate Adaptation and Evolution

by John G. Fleagle, Andrea L. Baden, Christopher C. Gilbert

Overview

Primate Adaptation and Evolution, Fourth Edition provides key features of extant families and references to more detailed texts. The book sets the scene and creates space for a thorough updating of exciting developments in primate paleontology and a reconstruction through early hominid species of our own human origins. This updated version covers recent developments in primate paleontology, the latest taxonomy, and includes new visuals, including helpful illustrations and evolutionary trees. It is an ideal text for undergraduate and post-graduate students studying the evolution and functional ecology of primates and early fossil hominids.The book retains its grounding in the extant primate groups as the best way to understand the fossil trail and evolution of these modern forms. However, this coverage is now more streamlined, referring to the many new and excellent books on living primate ecology and adaptation - a field that has burgeoned since this book's first publication.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780128158098
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	04/10/2025
Edition description:	4th ed.
Pages:	466
Product dimensions:	8.70(w) x 11.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Fleagle is a primatologist whose research combines field studies and functional morpho-logical analysis. He is interested in the adaptive radiation of primates during the last 50 million years. He has conducted paleobiological research in Egypt, Argentina, and Ethiopia and has studied living primates in Malaysia, Surinam, Brazil and Madagascar. Dr. Fleagle is a MacArthur Fellow.

Table of Contents

Adaptation, Evolution, and Systematics; The Primate Body; Primate Lives; Prosimians; New World Anthropoids; Old World Monkeys; Apes and Humans; Primate Communities; Primate Adaptations; The Fossil Record; Primate Origins; Fossil Prosimians; Early Anthropoids; Fossil Platyrrhines; Fossil Apes; Fossil Old World Monkeys; Fossil Hominids; Patterns in Primate Evolution

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The newest edition of the market-leading textbook on primate adaptation and evolution

Editorial Reviews

from:Reviews of the First Edition
"Fleagle's book...is a tour de force as well as a tour d'horizon of the primate order....Fleagle's book fills a long-standing need for a comprehensive and up-to-date introductory text in its field." —NATURE

"Just occasionally in academic life there comes together in one person research ability, industry, and the willingness to communicate. This is indeed the case for John Fleagle's textbook. An admirable book that deserves the success that it will undoubtedly achieve." —BIOLOGY AND SOCIETY


"Professional primatologists and students alike will be delighted with John Fleagle's Primate Adaptation and Evolution, which will brilliantly refresh any university reading list in the subject. For many university courses on primate biology, it will undoubtedly become a primary text." —THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT

"This is an excellent book on primate comparative anatomy, behavioral ecology, and paleontology." —AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

"John Fleagle has done it! Primate Adaptation and Evolution is the readable and "seeable," but still traditional, textbook that my students have been waiting for someone to write." —AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

"This book will be welcomed with a sigh of relief in departments of anatomy and biological anthropology world-wide. Here at last is an up-to-date, comprehensive and reliable textbook for courses in primate and human evolution.... It will, and should, stand as a major teaching resource for primate evolution for some years to come. It is an excellent text and a reflection of Fleagle's major contributions to our field." —PRIMATE EYE

"This volume is basically designed as an advanced undergraduate or graduate textbook but is so well illustrated and organized that it can also be used as a general source or reference for less specialized readers. No other single work can match the range of its topics, which matches the interests of its author, one of the leading students of primate paleontology, behavior, morphology, and evolution." —CHOICE

From the Publisher