Holes in the head: Evolutionary interpretations of the paranasal sinuses in catarrhines

✍ Scribed by Todd C. Rae; Thomas Koppe

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 450 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1060-1538
• DOI: 10.1002/evan.20036

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Everyone who has ever experienced a head cold is familiar with the paranasal sinuses, the bony hollows above and beside the nasal cavity that contribute, sometimes painfully, to upper respiratory tract disorders. These internal cranial structures have a wide distribution among eutherian mammals and archosaurs.1, 2 Sinuses have languished somewhat in the shadow of their better known and more accessible morphological cousins (dentition, postcrania), but new imaging techniques, growth studies, and explicit phylogenetic evaluation3 are beginning to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the evolution of these enigmatic spaces in primates and promise to yield insights into the evolution of the facial skeleton.