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Fall 2002

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Around the Pond

Lemurs -
Little chewing machines

Marietta Pritchard




	FROM MADAGASCAR TO MACHMER: Laurie Godfrey with a cast of an extinct lemur skull (photo by Ben Barnhart)

The shelves in Laurie Godfrey’s lab in Machmer Hall are full of bones and skeletons. On the walls are pictures of cute primates – a smiling chimpanzee and mischievous-looking lemurs. The ebullient professor of anthropology wears a blue T-shirt with a loris, another cute primate on it.

Godfrey is describing her important discoveries about Madagascan lemurs. Because Madagascar, an island off Africa’s east coast, has been isolated from the mainland for millions of years, it provides an excellent laboratory for studying evolutionary behavior. A long-time researcher on Madagascar, Godfrey is studying the dental development in the sifaka, one variety of extant lemur, which, she explains, is a "cousin" of the extinct giant lemurs– including some that ranged up to 400-plus pounds – which she wants to know more about. "Sifakas are delightful animals," she says. "They’re about three feet high and move like this." She gets up and bounces for a couple of yards.

An article by Godfrey and several other researchers in the April 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details their discovery that the giant extinct relatives of sifakas, contrary to assumptions about other large primates (like us), had "incredibly fast" dental development, much like their smaller living relatives. "When you think big animal, you think slow life-history, including dental development," says Godfrey – long gestation, late weaning, late sexual maturity. Small animals, by contrast, are usually on a fast life-history schedule. So the fast dental development of the little lemurs fits with conventional wisdom, but their new, surprising evidence shows that the sifaka-like giant lemurs also had sifaka-like "runaway dentition," though the rest of their development was slow.

Using a new technique, Godfrey and her colleagues were able to reconstruct the gestation period of these giant "sub-fossil" lemurs. What they found was that, just as in sifakas, the crown of the first molar, M1, had already begun its mineralization by the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. In humans, the crown of M1 has barely begun to mineralize before birth, says Godfrey. But in the little sifaka, "it erupts at three months." By the time they’re weaned, "they’re little chewing machines, able to process very hard foods." It’s an important survival mechanism, and it appears that their big cousins were doing the same thing.

Godfrey and her colleagues have applied for funds from the National Science Foundation and from the Leakey Foundation to continue research on the dental development and life histories of living and extinct lemurs.

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