Jaw-muscle fiber architecture and skull form facilitate relatively wide jaw gapes in male cercopithecoid monkeys

Abstract

In primates and other mammals, the capacity to generate a wide maximum jaw gape is an important performance variable related to both feeding and nonfeeding oral behaviors, such as canine gape display and clearing the canines for use as weapons during aggressive encounters. Across sexually dimorphic catarrhine primates, gape is significantly correlated with canine height and with musculoskeletal features that facilitate wide gapes. Given the importance of canine gape behaviors in males as part of intrasexual competition for females, functional relationships between gape, canine height, and musculoskeletal morphology can be predicted to differ between the sexes. We test this hypothesis by investigating sex-specific relationships among these variables in a maximum sample of 32 cercopithecoid species. Using phylogenetic least squares regression, we found that of 18 predicted relationships, 16 of the 18 (89%) were significant in males, whereas only six (33%) were significant in females. Moreover, 15 of the 18 correlations were higher—10 of the 18 significantly higher—in males than in females. Males, but not females, showed strong and significant positive allometry of fiber lengths, indicating that increase in male jaw length is accompanied by allometric increases in the capacity for muscle stretch. While males and females showed significant negative allometry for muscle leverage, only males showed significant negative allometry of muscle leverage relative to jaw gape and canine height. Collectively, these results provide support for the hypothesis that as selection acted to increase relative canine height in male cercopithecoids, one change was an allometric increase in relative maximum jaw gape, along with allometric increases in musculoskeletal morphologies that facilitate gape. Lastly, if gape and canine display/clearance are key targets of selection on masticatory morphology in male cercopithecoids, then cercopithecoid monkeys such as macaques, baboons, and sooty mangabeys may have diminished utility as models for drawing paleobiological inferences from musculoskeletal morphology about feeding behavior and diet in fossil hominins.