Micro computed tomography (microCT) images of a squirrel monkey skull dataset derived from classic malnutrition experiments in biological anthropology

Abstract

During parts of the 1980s and 1990s, the team led by Dr. Héctor M. Pucciarelli, a distinguished Argentine biological anthropologist, carried out a series of experiments in which he modeled the effect of protein restriction on postnatal development. For this purpose, he used primates of the species Saimiri boliviensis. Since the 1950s, the field of biological anthropology had proposed the incorporation of an experimental perspective to address issues related to human biological development. Influenced by these ideas, Dr. Pucciarelli conducted this work, which resulted in a unique and original body of publications. The skulls derived from these experiments constitute the subject of the database shared here. We undertook the scanning of this material using micro-computed tomography technology in order to obtain high-resolution images. The resulting image stacks derived from this acquisition are provided here together with information on experimental groups. While it would be neither feasible nor ethically desirable to replicate those experiments under current standards, the material resulting from that work can still be meaningfully utilized without causing harm, thereby allowing continued scientific value to be drawn from the original experiments.