Here come the Skulls!

Prep- Skull lab
Which skull are you most excited about seeing? Why?
I’m looking forward to seeing the baby chimp skull compared to the skull of a baby human, I have always been curious to see how different our skulls are start before they really have time to grow and develop. Early in the course we learned that the great apes have a great deal of their skull plates closed off by the large jaw muscle that forms through the side holes in their skull, I’m interest to see where on the skull this muscle resides.

Paraphrase the hypothesis that you are testing in this lab.
In this lab we will be testing the hypothesis that our skulls have evolved over time from that of chimpanzee or related ancestor, because of a disturbance/change in the timeline within evolution.

What is standardization? Why is it necessary? How will you standardize the measurements you are taking in this lab?
Standardization is when you use the height to length ratio to measure something instead of it actual size, by doing this you can measure things that change in shape as they get older and change size. This is necessary because without this your ability to measure the same species at different stages of life you need a standardization system. I will take the height and length measurements of both an adult skull and the baby skull to see/study the difference.

Post a picture of an axolotl on your blog; cite your source. Write a caption for the figure, explaining why this is such a cool example of heterochrony. (See Below)

What would we look like if we grew isometrically starting at birth?
We would look like huge babies, Our heads would be very large for our bodies and we would all most likely be pudgy and have smooth skin, LOL and pampers would have to make a much bigger diaper

What is sexual dimorphism?
Sexual dimorphism is when you have two different body structures built into the genes or evolution of a particular species, a good example of this can be seen in apes where the males are a great deal larger than the females because of the males need to fight for dominance in order to gain access to the females during mating. This is not found to as large a degree within the human race.

Give an example of an organism (it doesn’t have to be an animal!) that grows allometrically, but that isn’t discussed in the lab handout. Think of one on your own instead of looking it up on the Internet.
I think that a butterfly could be considered an extreme version of this process, as it is born it comes into the world as a caterpillar only to completely change its bodily form into a butterfly a few days later in its stage of adult hood.