Primates
laelaps | November 21, 2008"The Lion of the Season," from Mr. Punch's Victorian Era.As Charles Darwin was readying to release his treatise on evolution by natural selection (which was turned into an abstract rushed into press in 1859), Richard Owen was trying to separate humans from other primates. In 1857 he proposed that we belonged to our own distinct subclass, and it was peculiar structures in our brains that made all the difference.
That our species were more cognitively developed than apes was clear, but did our supposed superiority stem from something anatomical, unique to us alone? Owen thought so, the…
laelaps | November 17, 2008A red ruffed lemur (Varecia rubra), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.[Like what you see here? Then vote for me in the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship contest!]
laelaps | November 14, 2008
For over 300 years, our species has recognized the similarities between ourselves and other primates, particularly apes. For most of that time scholars in the West have attempted to keep our species cordoned off from our relatives, either through the static hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being or the possession of particular traits (from a hippocampus minor in the brain to a soul). Evolutionary theory, however, required researchers to look for similarities instead of stark differences. Which apes were our closest relatives?
It has only been recently that the two living species of chimpanzee…
laelaps | November 7, 2008Geladas (Theropithecus gelada, females in the foreground, male in the background), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | November 1, 2008A juvenile Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | October 21, 2008As soon as you have anything to do with the gorilla the fascination of studying him begins to grow on you and you instinctively begin to speak of the gorilla as "he" in a human sense, for he is obviously as well as scientifically akin to man. - Carl Akeley
There are few places that I find as stimulating at the American Museum of Natural History, but the great halls of stuffed animals always put me in a somber mood. The organic parts of the reconstituted creatures were collected long ago, and large metal letters on the wooden frames telling the viewer who had donated the skins to the museum.…
laelaps | October 16, 2008A Coquerel's Sifaka (Propithecus coquereli), photographed at the Bronx zoo.