Long bone articular dimensions for four hominoid taxa

Postcranial metric data collected for western lowland gorillas, modern humans, common chimpanzees, and lar gibbons from Gordon (2025a).

Usage

apelimbart

Format

A data frame with 376 rows and 15 variables:

Species

factor Species name, with four possible levels (in decreasing order of postcranial dimorphism: "Gorilla gorilla", "Homo sapiens", "Pan troglodytes", and "Hylobates lar")

Museum

factor Collection housing each specimen

Collection.ID

character Unique specimen identifier within each collection

Sex

factor two possible levels: "F" and "M"

Wild

factor four possible levels: "Yes", "Unknown", "Died in captivity", "No"

Mass.kg

numeric Body mass in kilograms when recorded in museum records. Collections often record weight in pounds, in which case data were converted to mass in kilograms.

FHSI

numeric Femoral head superoinferior diameter: the maximum superoinferior diameter of the femoral head.

TPML

numeric Tibial plateau mediolateral width: the maximum mediolateral width of the articular surface of the tibial plateau.

TPMAP

numeric Tibial plateau medial condyle anteroposterior length: the maximum anteroposterior length of the articular surface of the medial condyle of the tibial plateau.

TPLAP

numeric Tibial plateau lateral condyle anteroposterior length: the maximum anteroposterior length of the articular surface of the lateral condyle of the tibial plateau.

HHMaj

numeric Humeral head major axis diameter: treating the articular surface of the humeral head as a partial oblate spheroid, this is the length of the major axis passing through the oblate spheroid.

HHMin

numeric Humeral head minor axis diameter: the maximum width of the articular surface of the humeral head perpendicular to the major axis.

RHMaj

numeric Radial head major axis diameter: treating the radial head in proximal view as an ellipse, this is the length of the major axis passing through the ellipse.

RHMin

numeric Radial head minor axis diameter: the maximum width of the radial head perpendicular to the major axis.

RDAP

numeric Distal radius anteroposterior width: the distance between the anterior and posterior extents of the boundary between the lunate and scaphoid facets of the distal articular surface of the radius.

RDML

numeric Distal radius mediolateral breadth: the maximum width of the distal articular surface of the radius when the medial point of this dimension is constrained to the midpoint of the curve of the articulation with the distal ulna.

References

Gordon AD. (2025a) Interpreting statistical significance in hominin dimorphism: Power and Type I error rates for resampling tests of univariate and missing-data multivariate size dimorphism estimation methods in the fossil record. Journal of Human Evolution. 199:103630. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2024.103630)

Examples

data(apelimbart)
ggplot2::ggplot(apelimbart, ggplot2::aes(x=log10(FHSI), y=log10(HHMaj), 
                                         color=Species, shape=Sex)) +
  ggplot2::geom_point(size=2) +
  ggplot2::scale_shape_manual(values = c(19,3))

ggplot2::ggplot(apelimbart, ggplot2::aes(x=log10(FHSI), y=log10(Mass.kg),
                                         color=Species, shape=Sex)) +
  ggplot2::geom_point(size=2) +
  ggplot2::scale_shape_manual(values = c(19,3))
#> Warning: Removed 223 rows containing missing values or values outside the scale range
#> (`geom_point()`).