Postcranial skeletal size measurements of hybrid captive Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

Abstract

The dataset consists of postcranial measurements of size taken virtually from CT scans of fully articulated skeletons of 134 adult M. mulatta. The measurements are maximum long bone lengths, weight at scanning, and crown-rump length. The majority of monkeys were scanned in vivo, with a few scanned as cadavers following natural death. The sample comes from a colony house at the California National Primate Center, University California Davis (CNPRC), which is composed of Indian, Chinese and hybrid animals. For more information see our article. Our research sought to examine the relationship between admixture and body size in the context of previous research that had suggested hybridisation in non-human primates leads to extreme size and heightened variation in offspring. This research had largely been carried out on hybrids between more distantly related parental taxa and on early generation hybrids. Our project is aimed at better understanding what determines hybrid morphology in non-human primates with the ultimate aim of building models for hybridisation between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. These data were comparable with previous work and enabled us to show that, contrary to previous research in other taxa, in M. mulatta hybrids are relatively small but not outside of the range of parental variation