primate
laelaps | March 31, 2010
A grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus). Image from Wikipedia.
Charles Darwin's visit to the Galapagos Archipelago has been celebrated time and again for its influence on his evolutionary thoughts, but I have to wonder what would have happened if the Beagle skipped the Galapagos and visited Madagascar instead. What would Darwin have made of the animals which had been evolving in splendid isolation on the African island? Would "Darwin's lemurs", rather than Darwin's finches, be among the most recognizable icons of evolution?
Answers to such questions are beyond our grasp, but the diverse…
laelaps | March 3, 2010
The exceptionally preserved skeleton of Darwinius, known popularly as "Ida." From PLoS One.
Almost ten months ago an international team of researchers introduced the world to an exquisitely-preserved primate from the 47 million year old oil shales of Messel, Germany. Dubbed Darwinius masillae, and nicknamed "Ida" and "The Link", the fossil was touted as one of our earliest primate ancestors in a massive media campaign worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. Yet the trouble was that there was no solid evidence that Darwinius was one of our ancestors. Despite the marketing blitz promoting the…
edyong | October 21, 2009Cast your mind back to June, when a stunning fossil animal called Darwinius (alternatively Ida or "The Link") was unveiled to the world to tremendous pomp and circumstance. Hyperbolic ads declared the day of Ida's discovery as the most important for 47 million years. A press release promised that she would "change everything", headlines proclaimed her a "missing link in evolution" and the scientists behind the discovery billed her as "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor".
And according to a new study, none of that is true. Mere months later, Erik Seiffert from Stony Brook…
emjohnson | July 5, 2009Bonobos (Pan paniscus) at Frankfurt Zoo, Germany. Joachim S. Müller / Creative Commons
zooillogix | November 20, 2008"Scientists" tell us that the tarsier is the only member of its lonely family Tarsiidae, which itself is the lone extant family within the infraorder Tarsiiformes... We here at Zooillogix think they might be more closely related to other species than zoologists think...
Pygmy tarsier vs. Furby
Pygmy tarsier vs. Mogwai
Pygmy tarsier vs. Jabba
Pygmy tarsier vs. Little grey
Reader Suggested
Pygmy tarsier vs. Little Fuzzy
Credit to Mad Hussein LOL Scientist
Pygmy tarsier vs. Gilbert Gottfried
(Maybe the hands?) Credit to Katie Thompson
Pygmy tarsier vs. Critters
Credit to Benji…
zooillogix | November 19, 2008High in the mountaintop forests of Indonesia, this little Furby-gremlin hybrid hid undiscovered (and unmolested) for the last ninety years. Last seen alive in the 1920s, the pygmy tarsier was thought extinct until researchers from Texas A&M University rediscovered the little guy last month.
Pygmy tarsier is not amused.
Over a 2.5 month period, the scientists trapped two males and one female in Lore-Lindu National Park. After taking measurements and affixing radio collars, the researchers were unable to resist the urge to love them, and hug them, and squeeze them and call them George.…
zooillogix | June 30, 2008Tarsiers are prosimian primates, sharing their primitive grouping with lemurs, bushbabies and the aye-aye. However, due to numerous similarities to ancestral monkeys, apes and humans, there is some disagreement as to whether tarsiers should be grouped with the other prosimians in the Suborder Strepsirrhini or with the monkeys and friends in the Suborder Haplorrhini. The tarsier finds all of this debate quite dull and prefers to spend its time eating insects and bird eggs.
These pictures were taken by our friend's father in the jungles of the central Philippines.
They look pissed.
Special…
bleimanb | March 11, 2008Almost a year ago we posted the Dramatic Chipmunk. Turns out he's got a cousin...
laelaps | October 9, 2007Category: Anthropology
As I mentioned just prior to my move to Sb, I spent this past Saturday at NYU at the "Evolutionary Anthropology at the Interface" conference, which was primarily a celebration of the work of Cliff Jolly. I'm still a bit over my head when it comes to knowing the full "Who's Who" of evolutionary anthropology, but I do know that Cliff Jolly is most well known for his "seed-eaters" hypothesis of human origins, in which extant baboons (Papio sp.) are proposed to be better primates to study when considering primate origins and a seed-eating diet is put forward as one of the…