orang-utan
grrlscientist | January 13, 2010tags: art, wildlife art, stop-motion painting, Lanjak Dawn, Crowned Flying Lizard, Orang-utan, entertainment, Carel Brest van Kempen, streaming video
This is yet another fascinating stop-motion video of the creation of artist Carel Brest van Kempen's painting, Lanjak Dawn. This is his first major painting to receive the time-lapse treatment. In this piece, a male Crowned Flying Lizard displays to a prospective mate in a Bornean forest while a big male Orang-utan calls from his sleeping nest. Featuring music; I Formed the World with my Tongue, I Cleared the Bar with my Diaphragm and Haloumi,…
edyong | August 4, 2009You'll sometimes hear people lowering their voices to make themselves sound tougher or more commanding. We're not the only ones - it seems that our close relatives, the orang-utans, pull the same trick, and they use tools to do it. Madeleine Hardus from the University of Utrecht has found preliminary evidence that young orang-utans use leaves for deception, in order to make lower-pitched calls that seem to come from a much larger animal.
While many animals are accomplished tool-users, most use their utensils to find food. A few populations of orang-utans, living in Borneo, are the only…
edyong | June 4, 2009 If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different - chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds ("ha" or "hee"). Listen to a recording and you wouldn't identify it as laughter - it's more like a handsaw cutting wood.
But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny. Apes make these noises during play or when tickled, and they're accompanied by distinctive open-mouthed "play faces". Darwin himself noted the laugh-like…
edyong | February 11, 2009This is the sixth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial.
Physically, we are incredibly different from our ape cousins but genetically, it's a different story. We famously share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Our proteins are virtually identical and our chromosomes have more or less the same structure. At the level of the nucleotide (the "letters" that build strands of DNA), little has happened during ape evolution. These letters have been changing at a considerably slower rate than in our relatives than in other…