Analysis of selected hominoid joint surfaces using laser scanning and geometric morphometrics: A preliminary report

Abstract

Fred Szalay is a polymath of evolutionary morphology. From the mid-1960s (Szalay, 1968) to at least the mid-1980s (Szalay et al., 1987), he was acknowledged as the leading researcher on non-anthropoid fossil primates, complementing the anthropoid expertise of Elwyn Simons who had just laid the foundations for paleoprimatology as a distinct field through his revisions and field success in the Fayum of Egypt. Fred edited two volumes in this area in 1975, in both of which Delson (as a very junior colleague) was most pleased to be included (Szalay, 1975; Luckett and Szalay, 1975), which in turn led to their collaborative review of the whole order (Szalay and Delson, 1979). Fred was also an early critic of the cladistic approach to phylogenetic reconstruction, passionately opposed to the narrowness of evolutionary thinking that he felt stemmed from cladistic thinking, so he developed (often with Walter Bock) a refinement of the “evolutionary” taxonomic approach (e.g., Szalay, 1977b, 1993; Szalay and Bock, 1991). Although his earliest work focused on crania and dentitions, Fred was equally interested in postcranial morphology from both functional and phylogenetic viewpoints (Decker and Szalay, 1974; Szalay and Decker, 1974; Szalay et al., 1975); he almost single-handedly made morphology of the postcranium relevant to mammalian phytogeny reconstruction, and he argued that the distinction between functionalism and non-functional thinking was entirely artificial. His long 1977(a) paper on mammalian phytogeny was almost entirely based on the evidence from foot bones, and this focus continued in his work on primates (Szalay and Dagosto, 1980, 1988; Szalay and Langdon, 1986) as well as eutherian and especially metatherian mammals (Szalay and Drawhorn, 1980; Szalay, 1984, 1994; Szalay and Lucas, 1993, 1996; Szalay and Sargis, 2001). Fred argued that taxa could just as readily be distinguished by their postcrania as by their teeth, ear regions or facial structure. Many of his colleagues rejected this idea or thought that (at best), postcranial morphology might delineate families or subfamilies, but not genera or species. Fred’s most recent contribution (Szalay, 2007; in a book whose co-editor is the same as this volume’s) reviewed the locomotor adaptations of the earliest primates and their predecessors, comparing several entrenched hypotheses unfavorably to his own prior interpretations.