Incisor tooth wear and age determination in mountain gorillas from Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.

Incisor tooth wear and age determination in mountain gorillas from Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.

Galbany, Jordi;Muhire, Thadée;Vecellio, Veronica;Mudakikwa, Antoine;Nyiramana, Aisha;Cranfield, Michael R;Stoinski, Tara S;McFarlin, Shannon C;
american journal of physical anthropology 2018 Vol. 167 pp. 930-935
300
galbany2018incisoramerican

Abstract

Ecological factors, but also tooth-to-tooth contact over time, have a dramatic effect on tooth wear in primates. The aim of this study is to test whether incisor tooth wear changes predictably with age and can thus be used as an age estimation method in a wild population of mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) from Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.In mountain gorillas of confidently known chronological age (N = 24), we measured the crown height of all permanent maxillary and mandibular incisors (I , I , I , I ) as a proxy for incisal macrowear. Linear and quadratic regressions for each incisor were used to test whether age can be predicted by crown height. Using these models, we then predicted age at death of two individual mountain gorillas of probable identifications, based on their incisor crown height.Age decreased significantly with incisor height for all teeth, but the upper first incisors (I ) provided the best results, with the lowest Akaike's Information Criterion corrected for small sample size (AICc) and lowest Standard Error of the Estimate (SEE). When the best age equations for each sex were applied to gorillas with probable identifications, the predicted ages differed 1.58 and 3.33 years from the probable ages of these individuals.Our findings corroborate that incisor crown height, a proxy for incisal wear, varies predictably with age. This relationship can be used to estimate age at death of unknown gorillas in the skeletal collection, and in some cases, to corroborate the identity of individual gorillas recovered from the forest postmortem at an advanced state of decomposition. Such identifications help fill gaps in the demographic database and support research that requires individual-level data.

Citation

ID: 15521
Ref Key: galbany2018incisoramerican
Use this key to autocite in SciMatic or Thesis Manager

References

Blockchain Verification

Account:
NFT Contract Address:
0x95644003c57E6F55A65596E3D9Eac6813e3566dA
Article ID:
15521
Unique Identifier:
10.1002/ajpa.23720
Network:
Scimatic Chain (ID: 481)
Loading...
Blockchain Readiness Checklist
Authors
Abstract
Journal Name
Year
Title
5/5
Creates 1,000,000 NFT tokens for this article
Token Features:
  • ERC-1155 Standard NFT
  • 1 Million Supply per Article
  • Transferable via MetaMask
  • Permanent Blockchain Record
Blockchain QR Code
Scan with Saymatik Web3.0 Wallet

Saymatik Web3.0 Wallet