William L. Jungers, a gentle giant in Madagascar

Abstract

William L. Jungers is perhaps best known for his work on human evolution and especially Australopithecus afarensis (“Lucy”) and Homo floresiensis (the “Hobbit”), but Madagascar was his first love, and the place to which he retired (Figure 1). His last professional affiliation was Association Vahatra in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Bill's first edited book (Size and Scaling in Primate Biology) showcased his broad comparative perspective and the statistical savvy with which he approached research on all topics in paleobiology throughout his career. During the mid‐20th century, paleobiology was on a steady journey toward increased parameterization and quantitative rigor, embracing the primary goals of using pattern in the fossil record to deduce evolutionary process and allometric variation to deduce behavior, physiology, and indeed, also, evolutionary process. Bill's book was one of several that focused on allometry, evolution, and the biology of scaling. From the beginning, having completed in 1976 a doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan on the appendicular skeleton of Megaladapis, one of Madagascar's “giant” lemurs, Madagascar's extinct and extant lemurs were central to Bill's thinking about skeletal allometry. Understanding scaling was not merely a tool to reconstruct the body masses of extinct animals, but to understand how size affects musculoskeletal anatomy in species belonging to different locomotor groups (e.g., climbers, vertical clingers and leapers)—and more than that, how size affects behavior and physiology. But, in good measure, Bill's ability to “read” bones, and from those analyses, to visualize the past, sprang from his expertise beyond biometrics—that is, his knowledge of comparative primate anatomy and biomechanics. Extinct and extant lemurs, with their extraordinary diversity in form and function, accorded him superb subject matter. Thus, when in 2002 he coedited a book on Reconstructing behavior in the primate fossil record with J. Michael Plavcan, Richard Kay, and Carel van Schaik, his own contribution (apart from coauthoring the introductory and concluding chapters) was on “Ecomorphology and behavior of giant extinct lemurs from Madagascar.” Throughout his career, his fascination with lemurs never waned. He contributed scores upon scores of publications on extinct and extant lemurs including comprehensive reviews, and the world benefited from his insights. One of Bill's landmark publications was a book coauthored with Steve Goodman (Extinct Madagascar: Picturing the island's past), with spectacular, anatomically accurate, and behaviorally realistic illustrations of Madagascar's late Holocene plant and animal communities. The prehistoric landscapes illustrated in this volume were creations that only skilled anatomists like Bill and Steve could envision, with the help of paleoecologists like one of us (David Burney) who, by looking through microscopes at assemblages of tiny pollen grains sampled from sedimentary deposits, could supply the associated vegetation. Bill was a remarkable person. To honor his memory as a friend and colleague, and to underscore his devotion to the heritage of the people of Madagascar, we offer our individual, personal testimonials (Figure 2).