Book Review: Primate Dentition. An Introduction to the Teeth of Non-Human Primates. By Daris R. Swindler, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, xv + 296 pp., US$80.00 (hardback)

Primate Dention is an updated version of Daris Swindler’s ubiquitous volume on the comparative anatomy of primate dentitions. Swindler’s original volume, published in 1976, has served as a valuable resource for persons needing a quick reference on comparative primate dental anatomy and as a source of comparative tooth size data. The new version is a welcome update, serving to make the volume more useful to current students of primatology, and likely to provide replacements for the dog-eared copies that have been much used over the years. The original book was essentially two separate texts: one a descriptive guide to primate dentitions; the other a set of tables of summary dental metrics. The adult dental metrics are identical to the original ones except that data on tree shrews and Macaca fuscata (= speciosa of the original) have been dropped. Conversely, Swindler provides a new set of chapters on dental anatomy, dental development, and the deciduous dentition, as well as new dental metrics on the deciduous dentitions of 9 species. These short, readable summaries will be welcome material to graduate students and researchers whose primary expertise is not dental anthropology. The descriptive chapters have been revised and updated. The essential speciesby-species descriptive nature of the material is retained, but new material has been incorporated, updating the text. New drawings of primate dentitions have been provided. While somewhat crude, they are improved from the original volume and, if perhaps too schematized in some respects, are still very useful as a general comparative guide to different primate dentitions. Swindler also consolidated the original dental eruption sequence charts into a single appendix a welcome improvement over the original in which the tables were scattered throughout the text. For many people the dental metric data are the most useful part of this work. Indeed, Swindler’s data have been cited over the years extensively, and