No native microbes were found by an early analysis of the ice on the drill used by a Russian team to penetrate Lake Vostok, a body of water buried deep under Antarctica s ice, in February.
Chimp haven The US National institutes of health (NIH) said on 17 Â October that it will send 20 Â chimpanzees to permanent retirement in a federally funded sanctuary by August 2013 double the number it announced last month.
The animals are among 110 Â NIH-owned chimpanzees that the agency is removing from the New Iberia Research center in Lafayette, Louisiana Officials at the 80-hectare Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville,
Primates were always tree-dwellersprimates love to climb and most make their homes high up in the branches of trees,
Now, the discovery of some ankle bones is making it look likely that primates were arboreal from the very beginning.
The earliest primate, Purgatorius, lived around 65 million years ago and is well known from the same fossil beds in Montana that yield tyrannosaurs just a few metres deeper down.
the ankle bones are the right size for pairing with all of the teeth that have been collected in the same area and look a lot like the ankles of later primates.
"The anatomy of these specimens certainly matches that of known Paleocene primates, but a skull or a full skeleton would tell us so much more,
Primate or not, the ankle bones suggest considerable flexibility.""This animal s foot clearly had a wide range of motion,
"We really think this closes the question of where the first primates were living, says Chester.
"We think there is a connection here between primates and plant evolution, with fruits playing a role in luring them up,
so groups such as rodents and primates never shared the planet with the prehistoric reptiles. This conclusion is backed up by the fact that no one has ever found fossils of placental mammals from before the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago
and flying lemurs are equally closely related to primates, which include humans. Genetic studies had suggested that flying lemurs were related most closely.
Humans are not the only copycatsa team led by Erica van de Waal, a primate psychologist at the University of St andrews,
UK, created two distinct cultures'blue'and'pink'among groups of wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops) in South Africa1.
The researchers trained two sets of monkeys to eat maize (corn) dyed one of those two colours
Baby monkeys ate the same colour maize as their mothers. Seven of the ten males that migrated from one colour culture to another adopted the local colour preference the first time that they ate any maize.
The only immigrant to buck this trend was a monkey who assumed the top rank in his new group as soon as he got there
says Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research center at Emory University in Atlanta,
Primate carriers Vietnam Airlines said on 19 april that it will no longer transport primates used in research experiments, effective from 1 may.
It was one of the last major carriers to transport primates for research: only Air france and Philippine Airlines say that they still do so.
Primate pull out Harvard Medical school announced on 23 Â April that it will close its 47-year-old New england Primate Research center in Southborough, Massachusetts.
860 nonhuman primates   mostly macaques   will close by 2015 owing to a cash shortage.
The animals will be transferred to other primate research centres or be maintained on site, say medical-school officials.
with four primate deaths occurring between June 2010 and February 2012. See go. nature. com/zsavjr for more.
or transplants of living cells from other species. It would also stop the breeding of dogs, cats and primates in Italy for research,
one rather disgusting skin disease that his doctors linked to baboon faecal matter, and a fresh perspective on Africa's wild animals.
The team already has its eye on other cores that it could drill
Study linking GM maize to rat tumours is retractedbowing to scientists'near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats,
The question of female orgasm is as usual more hotly contested though all female mammals have clitorises. Scientists can infer that animals--mostly primates--orgasm through recording physiological
Studies of primate orgasm have focused often on macaques a subset of monkeys which are used often in research
According to Alfonso Troisi a clinical psychiatrist in Rome who has studied female orgasm in Japanese macaques they're easier to study in the lab than gorillas or chimps.
Macaques species tend to have longer copulations than other primate species like gorillas which is a bonus
In the lab by artificial stimulation it is possible to trigger female orgasm in virtually any primate species. In a 1998 study he
and his co-author wrote that Under specific circumstances nonhuman primate females may experience orgasm. But the rate at which the females orgasmed was variable
Their study found that the level of dominance of the male macaque might play a role for instance.
me via email In the lab by artificial stimulation it is possible to trigger female orgasm in virtually any primate species. At the Institute for Primate Studies in Norman Okla. psychologist William Lemmon
and his grad student Mel Allen argued that the female chimpanzee manifests most if not all of the indices of sexual arousal and orgasm that occur in women.
Allen manually stimulated the clitorises and vaginas of female chimps in the course of writing his master's thesis at the University of Oklahoma Sexual response and orgasm in the female chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes.
Stanford university anthropologist Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff in 1974 writing on homosexual encounters between female stumptail macaques:
So when it comes to primates orgasms definitely seem to occur. What about the rest of the animal kingdom?
which he published (with a mildly NSFW video) in a hyper-readable study in PLOS ONE Spontaneous ejaculation has thus far been recorded in drowsy rats guinea pigs domestic cats warthogs horses and chimpanzees according to the study.
The 1970s and 1980s were the golden years for primate research and animal ethology according to Troisi who left primate research a decade ago.
Nowadays there is little money around (even in the US) field researchers get no funds and scientists working in the lab face the opposition of animal rights activists.
University of Toronto researcher Frances Burton's 1970 work which involved hooking monkeys up in a dog-harness contraption
and stimulating them with essentially a silicon monkey dildo for instance might be tough to get approved these days.
And though it's likely that most nonhuman primates have the ability to orgasm we can't really know for sure
Hey@Popsci is the#mysteryanimal a baboon? And then I might say if you think that's a baboon perhaps you are the baboon!
But probably not because this is a positive environment and all guesses are welcome and also this is not a very common animal so guess whatever you want!
Your dumb kids who thought that was a baboon! Update: And the winner is...@Tarabethidaho who correctly guessed that this creature is a cuscus!
#5 Reasons To Celebrate Colobus Daythe colobi are a group of Old world monkeys (meaning from Africa
They are better than Christopher Columbus for the following reasons. 1. Amazing Jumpersthe various species of colobus monkey--there are about five distinct species some with subspecies--are probably the most arboreal of all African monkeys.
It's not uncommon to see colobus monkeys leaping 20 feet from tree to tree. These aren't big monkeys;
that's the equivalent of a weak bad-jumping human leaping about 50 feet from a standstill.
me that he was not as good a jumper as a colobus monkey. 2. Great Tailscolobus monkeys have very long tails with delightful poofs at the end of them.
The best-known colobus monkey the mantled guereza (also called the Abyssinian black-and-white colobus) has an enormous poof sometimes taking up most of the length of the tail like a big white bottlebrush.
The mantled guereza uses the tail we think for balance as it jumps back and forth amongst the trees.
Christopher Columbus was tailless like the rest of his species 3. Super Stylishcolobus monkeys have cool beards;
the mantled guereza has dignified a and well-trimmed white beard that contrasts beautifully with its black undercoat bright white tail and long white western-inspired fringes.
The western red colobus has great bushy mutton-chops and a calico-patterned coat of bright rust white and black.
and has no beard. 4. Sustainable Dietscolobus monkeys are almost exclusively leaf-eaters filling an important niche in the tops of the African forest.
The colobus monkeys eat this abundant food and are able to digest it thanks to gut bacteria that ferments and breaks down the plant product.
This is unusual for a primate; gut bacteria of this sort is associated more often with ruminants like cows.
or overcompetition for resources. 5. Overcoming Adversitycolobus monkeys have very small stumps instead of thumbs unique among primates.
The evolutionary theory is that the thumb was irrelevant to the semi-brachiation mode of transport (swinging through trees) that the colobus uses;
if you look at the king of brachiation the gibbon you can see that its thumb is very far from its fingers and its mostly irrelevant for moving around.
The colobus uses its fingers like a hook to grab onto and swing from branches.
Not good enough Chris. You have been bested by a monkey a
#The latest outbreak of measles in the U s a preventable disease that the Western hemisphere eradicated decades ago thanks to vaccines has been traced to a megachurch in Texas. The church's senior pastor Terri Pearsons had criticized previously vaccines USA Today reports.
and the oil industry uses readings from the field to guide drills. In nature animals which use the field could be confused mightily-birds bees
The olinguito as its name suggests is highly similar to another member of the raccoon family the olingo an arboreal nocturnal animal that looks more like a combination of a possum and a monkey than a raccoon.
UCHICAGO News...The aquatic-ape hypothesis suggests that six million to eight million years ago apelike ancestors of modern humans had a semiaquatic lifestyle based on foraging for food
This playful challenge aspect of humor might go back to primates Polimeni theorizes--the way young chimps hit an alpha male in play to test boundaries.
There's also some evidence that apes enjoy slapstick too. In Inside Jokes Indiana University cognitive scientist Matthew Hurley and his co-authors put forward yet another theory of humor:
however with using these monkey kidney cells to both create the original vaccine strains and grow the vaccine in large quantities.
Monkeys contain simian viruses. 11 When the poliovirus was passaged through the monkeys or grown on the monkey kidney cells for production extrane g
#New Dinosaur Species Found In Utah Totally Looks like A Cowholy cow! Scientists have announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur called Nasutoceratops titusi
Head transplants have been done before most famously with rhesus monkeys in a 1970 procedure. But joining up a pair of central nervous systems proved too difficult to crack;
in the case of the rhesus monkeys many organs became functional but the animals were paralyzed from the neck down due to an inability to properly connect the spine.
Then a genetically altered pig gives birth to a chimp and finally from chimp to humans.
The ivory group tested many animal tissues this way including hippopotamus teeth elephant tail hairs and blue monkey hairs in addition to elephant tusks and rhino horns.
ONE NASA MONKEY OUTER SPACE SHOT FOR THE MOON AND REMOTE ORBIT LUNAR FLIGHT SPLASH DOWNFOR J f k. & JOHN GLENN ONE STALIN GORBACHAVESPUTNIK!
ONE NASA MONKEY OUTER SPACE SHOT FOR THE MOON AND REMOTE ORBIT LUNAR FLIGHT SPLASH DOWNFOR J f k. & JOHN GLENN ONE STALIN GORBACHAVESPUTNIK!
My elderly office manager says we are the lesser monkeys. When my child was born with a severe heart anomaly sentencing her to global developmental retardation Mental and physical
My elderly office manager says we are the lesser monkeys s
#European Bee Sperm bank Will Improve U s. Bee Gene Poolhere's a new idea for protecting the declining honeybee population in the U s. One team of scientists is importing European honeybee semen for fun
ONE NASA MONKEY OUTER SPACE SHOT FOR THE MOON AND REMOTE ORBIT LUNAR FLIGHT SPLASH DOWNFOR J f k. & JOHN GLENN ONE STALIN GORBACHAVESPUTNIK!
ONE NASA MONKEY OUTER SPACE SHOT FOR THE MOON AND REMOTE ORBIT LUNAR FLIGHT SPLASH DOWNFOR J f k. & JOHN GLENN ONE STALIN GORBACHAVESPUTNIK!
#World's Oldest Primate Fossil Discovered A tiny beady-eyed long-tailed primate with hand-like feet is now the world's oldest known fossil primate skeleton.
Recovered from sedimentary rock strata deposited in an ancient lake roughly 55 million years ago this fossil is the oldest primate fossil beating the previous record-holders--including Darwinius from Messel in Germany and Notharctus from the Bridger Basin in Wyoming
It's not just that it's the oldest primate but it turns out that this fossil tells us that primates had already been evolving for quite some time.
This primate was advanced already fairly in terms of the evolutionary tree says Christopher Beard a coauthor of the study and paleontologist from the Carnegie Museum of Natural history.
The Archicebus sits at a branch of the evolutionary tree which goes in two directions:
one toward living tarsiers large-eyed night-dwelling small primates and anthropoids the monkeys apes and humans
Beyond its addition to our understanding of evolution the ancient primate is also unique in its physique.
but a little marmoset which is a type of monkey from South america I was convinced this thing was going to be a very primitive anthropoid Beard says.
Here's an animal that combines features that we've just never seen before in one fossil primate.
and compared with other primates both living and fossilized. The analysis and data-gathering was one of the longest and most extensive phases of the study.
A tiny beady-eyed long-tailed primate with hand-like feet is now the worldã¢Â#Â#s oldest known fossil primate skeleton...
Because they would've had to have had a living breathing primate for the beady-eyed part or am
A stunning new fossil shows how simians got their start By Kate Wong. Excerpts:..a nearly complete 55-million-year-old skeleton of a mouse-size creature known as Carpolestes simpsoni.
Like modern primates (or euprimates...it has long fingers and toes as well as nails on its opposable digits...
that Carpolestes and its fellow plesiadapiforms were in fact archaic primates...Also see: news. nationalgeographic. com/news/2007/02/070201-primates. html Fossils of'Most Primitive Primate'Found Near Yellowstone by Brian Handwerk National geographic News February 1 2007.
Excerpts:..in a new study the paleontologists who found the fossils say that plesiadapiforms are in fact the most primitive known primates...
two 56-million-year-old fossils embedded in limestone in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin...'Not only does it share many characteristics with other primitive primates
but it seems to also share characteristics with the most primitive living tree shrews which are not primates'Bloch said...
In addition to detailing the fossil finds the study compared 173 skeletal characteristics of plesiadapiforms primates tree shrews and flying lemurs in hopes of unveiling their evolutionary links...
Comparisons of 85 living and extinct species suggest that all plesiadapiforms are actually primitive primates Bloch said...
The team's finding is likely to spark debate some scientists note because Dryomomys szalayi doesn't have all of the traits traditionally associated with modern primates.@
@Usutu: Good post but allow me to share some nuances from my own research. Darwin actually thought mutations (sports as they were called then) only played a small role in evolution.
He thought the main driving force was from organisms continually being pressured to adapt over generations sort of like Lamarck's idea but much slower.
Then too beady might be a relative term here as some small primates like tarsiers
The story of how humans evolved from knuckle-walking primates to upright bipeds is still a matter of great debate among anthropologists.
My wild card guess when monkeys change to running primates is when we became meat eaters.
Baboons walk upright when they wade in water to keep their heads up. Our ancestors might have learned that this was adventageous out of the water as well. visualize There is some theorizes that we primates might of spent a lot of time in water as you said forcing us to stand more up right loose our fur too.
I'd like to see you escape a cheetah by climbing a rock face. These dudes are master climbers.
If we evolved from apes we lost our strength speed climbing ability and protective hair (well..
Previously the team conducted this entire process including a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer in monkeys.
Those monkey embryo clones always died before they could grow into adult monkeys. While nuclear transfer breakthroughs often lead to a public discussion about the ethics of human cloning this is not our focus nor do we believe our findings might be used by others to advance the possibility of human reproductive cloning Shoukhrat Mitalipov the clone research's lead scientist said in a statement.
ONE NASA MONKEY OUTER SPACE SHOT FOR THE MOON AND REMOTE ORBIT LUNAR FLIGHT SPLASH DOWN FOR J f k. & JOHN GLENN ONE STALIN GORBACHAVE SPUTNIK!
Why Are There No Native Monkeys In North america? The infamous Mystery Monkey of Tampa an escaped rhesus macaque was captured back in October.
The rhesus macaque is not a rare monkey; it's adapted to human society better than most can survive on all kinds of foods
and can live in most any kind of hot-weather environment. And yet the Mystery Monkey captured the nation's attention.
A monkey! On the loose! In Florida! So cool! And it got us wondering: why aren't there monkeys all over the United states?
We've got tropical zones in the Florida keys and the Caribbean hot grasslands in the deep south humid swamps in Louisiana and South Florida.
Why don't we have any wild monkeys here? I spoke to Dr. John Flynn a paleontologist
and expert on mammalian evolution at the American Museum of Natural history to find out why the US is stuck with lame squirrels and pigeons and stuff rather than cool monkeys.
In terms of modern primates that's a true observation he said. But 50 million years ago there were primates here.
It turns out there are lots of reasons why the ancient primates that inhabited what is now the United states--and even Canada!
--no longer call those areas home. Primates came to the New world (meaning North and South america) from we think Africa.
As improbable as it sounds scientists think early primates crossed the Atlantic ocean and landed on the shores of both continents tens of millions of years ago probably on some kind of vegetation raft.
That's how most plants and animals get to isolated islands --which The americas were at the time.
Fossils have been recovered of early primates in Texas a whopping 43 million years ago the oldest primate fossil ever found in North america.
The Isthmus of panama which we now refer to as Central america didn't appear until much later by which time the climate on both Americas was very different from when the primates first landed there.
and the primates evolved and diversified to take advantage of that. Then the planet began to cool
It hit the primate family especially hard. In the New world the primate population shrunk significantly.
Any primate living in say the Great lakes region simply went extinct unable to cope with the new Wisconsin winters.
In South america the primates contracted to the region around the equator. But even the hottest southernmost parts of North america--then still detached from South america--were too chilly or otherwise inhospitable for the North american Primates.
The few places where they maybe could have survived like the Florida keys and the islands of the Caribbean were inaccessible.
Sure monkeys could have survived in Aruba if they had arrived at just the right time. But the chances of getting there on some kind of float the way primates had come over from Africa so many millions of years before were slim
and the Earth was cooling rapidly. There are some primate fossils from the Caribbean; Some monkeys have gotten to some of the Caribbean islands
and gone extinct says Dr. Flynn. Another collection of random events and they might have survived but not this time.
The specific type of primate that survived is called the Platyrrhines. The Platyrrhines or New world monkeys says Dr. Flynn are all arboreal.
They live in tropical forests; they're specialized for that kind of habitat. So the monkeys we now know which live in the warmer
and more forested parts of South and Central america are all the survivors of the cooling planet.
They lucked out and ended up in the one section of the New world that could suit them.
And there they stayed adapting and evolving. Then 3 million years ago the Isthmus of panama formed connecting North and South america and separating the Atlantic from the Pacific oceans.
A few species--Dr. Flynn specifically named the various species of spider monkey--were hardy enough to move north along the isthmus
Too dry and too sparsely forested for a New world monkey to traverse. Why haven't they moved further north?
Unlike the macaque and other Old world monkeys--or even non-primates like the raccoon or fox--they need trees they need heat
There's a distinct climate zone division in southern Mexico--no Mexican monkey can make it on the northern side.
Primates are often intelligent but that doesn't translate into adaptability. Think of the mountain gorilla restricted to a few populations in forested Central africa unable to live anywhere else.
Adaptability is often a sign of intelligence but intelligence in a species is no guarantee of adaptability.
The recurring answer to the question of why there are no monkeys in the US is how would they get here?
when that latitude would be deathly cold for a monkey. The only way you could get to North america would be polar routes
Even the most extreme monkeys don't get to the super high latitudes so the continent was effectively sealed off.
Monkeys can certainly survive in North america. The Mystery Monkey of Tampa is proof enough of that.
But for them to survive here they have to get here--the monkeys that were here the Platyrrhines aren't the ones to survive in a place like Tampa.
It's actually possible that a Platyrrhine could maybe give it a go in the Caribbean or the Florida keys the most tropical environments north of Mexico but:
Macaques could make it but it would take someone bringing them here--and that's exactly
what happened in the case of the Mystery Monkey which was part of a troupe of macaques released by some lunatic tour boat operator known as Colonel Tooey who thought the macaques would make for a better Jungle Cruise.
This is a true story. Florida is weird. Short of a whole bunch of determined crazies monkeys that would survive in North america don't have the means to get here.
Could the scourge of climate change lead to a friendly neighborhood monkey in Brooklyn? Anything is possible in evolution says Dr. Flynn.
So no monkeys in the near future. But if the temperature keeps rising I'll keep an eye out my window just the same.
Very interesting but the real reason we don't have monkeys is bananas. We don't have bananas.
Natural monkeys and Neanderthals primates do not like the cold. It is only the alien-(Gods as they were referred by the local folk
and exploit the primates and inventing modern man to really exploit the primates for their own purpose as the alien foreign folk visited Earth.
The Caribbean does have primates. the island of Trinidad has a fairly large population. And what physical separation is there between North
Why couldn't the monkeys just walk to North america like any other animal and adapt along the way?
And it is definitely possible for monkeys to adapt to cold. en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Golden snub-nosed monkeythey seem to do very well living in Atlanta Chicago and DC...
Even the cold monkeys cant navigate the WARM areas to get to the COLD areas. that is why animals die off the habitat they are in dies offi've seen quite a few.
There's a breeding colony of 3500 rhesus monkeys on a SC sea island. They're owned by the NIH
They actually do carry a virus that's harmless to monkeys but 80%fatal to humans!
Google monkey island sc if you don't believe it. monkeyisland...Historically the island has been uninhabitited due to its location and distance from the mainland.
Originally the monkey colony now located on Morgan Island was located in La Parguera Puerto rico at the Caribbean Primate Research center (Klopchin 2). According to the CDC (Center for disease control
and Prevention) there were incidents of the free-ranging monkeys escaping while infected with the herpes B virus
. Although the herpes B virus is not harmful to the monkeys once transmitted to a human the virus infection has an almost 80%fatality rate (Shemcreeks).
when the monkeys became overpopulated. Puerto rico was alarmed by this and South carolina stepped in to offer an island for research.
South carolina offered uninhabited Morgan Island for the monkeys to be housed. In 1979 over 1400 animals were relocated to Morgan Island (Klopchin 2)..http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Morgan island south carolinamr. george---it mentioned that possibly primates possibly crossed the atlantic in some type of boat
--i disagree--at one time there werent any massive oceans there must have been large seas between the continents---during the cooling period of earths formation steam was settled developing
when earth was starting to be formed. the primates were able to leave africa and cross the world travelling around the sea between africa and north america coming to our part of
when the primates came to the united states they discovered there werent bananas here so they didnt stay
and develop or wed have monkeys today in the united states. Can we blame global warming on those little North american monkeys in their monkey boats?
If anyone is interested actually in some answers about primates I'm a primatologist-in-training inquire
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