Departmental Resources
The Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy strives to provide our students with a broad background for the study of behavior, ecology, physiology, morphology, systematics, and evolution. The faculty and facilities in the department provide rich opportunities for a variety of field and laboratory studies, and most students combine these components during their graduate careers. Virtually all students take advantage of opportunities for fieldwork, even if research dissertations later focus on laboratory studies. Some of the current opportunities available in the Department include the following:
The Duke Lemur Center contains the world's largest collection of captive prosimians. The collection currently numbers about 300 individuals, including such rare genera as Propithecus and Daubentonia. Most species breed at the colony and several species are kept in large natural habitat enclosures. Located near the Duke campus, the primate colony is available for behavioral and, in some cases, physiological, anatomical, genetic, karyotypic or biochemical studies. There is also a large research collection of skeletal and frozen material.
The Division of Fossil Primates curates more than 22,000 fossils from Africa, Madagascar, India and North America. These fossils include the world’s premier series of early ancestors of apes and monkeys, represented by roughly 1,000 specimens from the Fayum of Egypt. The Division also houses the world’s largest collection of subfossil lemurs from Madagascar, totaling about 2,000 specimens. Added to this are roughly 600 early primate fossils from India and Wyoming. Additionally, faculty within the Department curate systematic fossil collections (as well as research cast collections) of primates from South America (Bolivia, Argentina and other localities). Many other mammals and vertebrate fossils are part of these collections. Current field projects in primate and hominid paleontology are ongoing in Bolivia and Argentina, North America, South Africa, Botswana, Madagascar, and Egypt.
The Department also offers a wide variety of facilities for the study of functional, comparative, and developmental anatomy. The Vertebrate Movement Laboratory is equipped with force plates, accelerometers, and high-speed videographic equipment and computer systems for kinematic and kinetic analyses of animal locomotion. Faculty within the Department maintain equipment for electromyography, strain gage analysis, bite force analysis, and jaw tracking analysis, radiography, computer image analysis, hormonal assays, and SEM analysis of dental tissues. In addition, the Duke University Comparative Embryology collection contains a large number of mammalian and other vertebrate embryos, and the Duke University Morphometrics laboratory provides access to equipment and facilities for computer-assisted measurement and analysis of morphological variation.