Photo of the Day #58: Baboon Skull

In honor of the presentation I'm delivering today (which comprises about half the subject of my term paper), here is the skull of a baboon (Papio sp.), baboons sometimes eating meat when they can get it. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), however, incorporate much more meat into their diet and have been known to steal kills from baboons at Gombe, the famous location in Tanzania. There is a problem with these observations, though, and that is that the events took place in the provisioning area where chimpanzees and baboons often had antagonistic interactions and don't try to steal baboon kills under other circumstances, so such active scavenging might not be natural behavior. For a time it was thought that chimpanzees did not scavenge at all, but recent observations at locations like Mahale show that they do, although it is an extremely rare event and so scavenged meat does not make up a substantial part of the chimpanzee diet.