primatological
- adjective
- /ˌpraɪməˈtɑlədʒɪkəl/
- Specialized
- The conference focused on primatological studies that explore the social behavior of monkeys.
Examples
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Early sociobiological views of the evolution of human gendered behaviors incorporated primatological data and viewed males and females as having differential reproductive strategies.
Blog text (25) -
I get the idea for that in the primatological research that I mentioned by Harry Harlow.
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Because there is no solid evidence for purely social relationships, we're working from various types of physiological and anatomical evidence, anthropological and primatological, and so on.
Academic text (2011) -
She attended a primatological forum to discuss recent discoveries about lemur communication.
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His thesis examined the primatological implications of tool use among chimpanzees.
Surface Forms
Morphology
primatological = primatology (semi-transparent) = primate + ology + ical
The word is structurally clear as 'primatology' plus '-ical', but its full meaning depends on the specialized noun 'primatology' rather than just the base word 'primate'.
Etymology
Primatological comes from primate, the name for monkeys, apes and lemurs, plus the ending -logical which means 'relating to the study of', like in biological. The root prim- means 'first', as in prime, because primates were once seen as special among animals, so primatological means 'relating to the scientific study of primates'.