The primary objective of this Dissertation Improvement Award is to study the facial skeleton in a group of early Miocene primates from Africa and Saudi Arabia. The group, the proconsulids, will be compared to early catarrhines and living anthropoids and the study will cover the 24 million years of our history. It will allow the refined use of facial characteristics for testing of proconsulid phylogenetic relationships. A series of metric and non-metric characteristics will be employed and a diagnostic characters of each group will be determined. This research will add to our understanding of the evolutionary relationships of the proconsulids and add to the utility of facial characteristics in phylogenetic studies.
