Top Ten Things to Know about Primates Quiz

Answer: True

Primates are the third most diverse order of mammals, after rodents (order Rodentia) and bats (which are not rodents but have their own order, Chiroptera).

Primates can be divided into two groups based on their noses! The wet-nosed primates (strepsirrhine) include lemurs and bushbabies; dry-nosed primates (haplorrhines) include tarsiers, all monkeys, and all apes. You can further subdivide the dry-nosed primates into downward-nosed (cattarhine) which are the New World monkeys, and flat-nosed (platyrrhine) which are the Old World monkeys and the apes.

All dry-nosed primates must consume vitamin C in their diets; all other mammals have an enzyme which allows their bodies to manufacture this nutrient.

Answer: False

Lemurs are in fact found the neighboring and much larger island of Madagascar. Lemurs are prosimians, which is to say they are not as evolved as other primates. In other words, they resemble what primates looked like millions of years ago. There are many species of lemur, the most common in North American zoos being ringtail (Lemur catta) and the black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata).

Lemurs are more vulnerable to extinction than other primates -- which is a high threshold as more than 48 percent of all primate species are threatened with extinction, mainly due to habitat loss and poaching.

Other prosimians include lorises, bushbabies, and tarsiers.

Answer: Gibbons

Gibbons have extremely long arms relative to their bodyweight and they have permanently hooked fingers. They have shoulder muscles and elbow flexors that generate a great deal of power, and their wrist joints take some of the weight off their shoulders. They conserve the energy of forward movement by using their bodies as a swinging pendulum -- very efficient.

Spider monkeys and muriquis can brachiate efficiently, but they use their prehensile tails to assist and combine it with leaping through the rainforest canopy, so technically they are semi-brachiatiors. For apes like chimpanzees and bonobos, really only a modified form of brachiation can be accomplished, not true brachiation, and it is hardly primary! Lemurs and other prosimians cannot brachiate; instead they vertically cling and leap from tree to tree.

Human beings are considered non-brachiating, but we can undergo strength-training and learn to brachiate in a limited fashion on the monkey bars, and children can also do modified brachiation because of their small size, but we do it very inefficiently. Likewise, juvenile gorillas and orangutans brachiate somewhat, but adults do not, because tree branches won't support their weight and their arms aren't long enough relative to their bodyweight to move like a pendulum. Instead, adults (especially orangutans) grip branches not with two hands but with both hands and both feet, and then move one foot/hand at a time from support branch to support branch. This is called quadrumanous motion.

Great apes make nests to sleep in, but gibbons, being lesser apes, sleep sitting up with the arms folded around them, their knees up, with their head between the knees, almost the way you might see a monkey in the wild. Gibbons can be very loud, their call heard a mile away or more.

Answer: True

From the pygmy tarsiers to the ponderous gorillas and everything in between, all primate species have fingernails. Although claws would be useful for climbing, fingernails are better for quickly releasing the hands and feet from tree trunks and branches while jumping from tree to tree, or while brachiating or otherwise moving from branch to branch.

Some fingernails are sharper than others, however; some monkeys' nails look like claws (and they will smart!) but they are in fact fingernails. All primates have fingerprints, too, which provide friction useful for holding on to things.

Answer: False

Monkeys are traditionally divided into Old World (Eurasia and Africa) and New World (the Americas), and one way to distinguish them at a glance, for the most part, is to look at their tails. For example, the colobus monkey found throughout Central Africa has a big, beautiful tail that helps with its balance for climbing and leaping, but it cannot hold anything. Monkeys of the New World usually have a prehensile tail, which means it can grasp and hold, so the creatures can hang from it. The tail test doesn't always work, however; the Barbary macaques of Gibraltar and Morocco have no tails at all!

Apes, which lack tails, can climb trees, too, though some larger ones may choose not to. In short, all primates have adaptations for climbing trees and most monkeys have tails, but only New World monkeys have tails that can grasp.

Answer: True

Monkeys and apes kept in isolation in labs suffer psychological damage.

Social organization varies from species to species. The golden lion tamarin, for instance, lives in large family groups that collectively raise babies. In fact, the father carries babies majority of the time. In captivity they reproduce every six months. They are one of the most critically endangered primates in the world.

The Barbary macaques of Gibraltar are organized into matriarchies. Common chimpanzees, in contrast, are very male-dominated, and there has been documented domestic violence, usually males against females.

Answer: True

(Of course, not all animals with eyes set at the front are primates.) The positioning of the eyes gives primates binocular, stereoscopic vision, which allows depth perception.

Some monkeys' eyes are "better" than others. The owl monkey, the only nocturnal monkey on Earth, has larger eyes than any other monkeys. Consequently, it has the best night vision, a perfect adaptation for the competitive rainforest. Owl monkeys can locate scraps that others leave behind, and nighttime is when the biggest, juiciest insects come crawling out -- food for the lucky owl monkeys!

Answer: True

Because of their large brain size, primates have high intelligence and therefore can be trained extensively. Capuchin monkeys, frequently seen in North America in captivity, are used as helping hands for quadruplegics and other people with severe physical disabilities. The crested capuchin, among the smartest and rarest of monkeys, are only in Eastern Brazil, and there are only a dozen in captivity in North America.

Primates also take a relatively long time to grow up and require a lot of attention from parents and possibly other family members, depending on the species. Primates generally give birth to young only one at a time; twinning and other multiple births are comparatively rare.

Answer: Europe and Australia

With the exception of the Barbary macaques of Gibraltar (sometimes erroneously called the Barbary apes because of their taillessness), the only primates found in Europe, the USA, and Canada are human beings. There are monkeys native to North America, but they are only in Mexico and the Central American countries.

There are also no primates, other than man, native to Australia and most of Oceania.

Answer: True

By the 21st century, anthropologists and biologists had begun classifying human beings and great apes (gorillas, chimps, bonobos, and orangutans) in the same family, Hominidae, and referring to humans as one of the great apes. Sometimes the term 'great apes' is used to refer to the non-human great apes, so it's become a kind of ambiguous term. Also, you may have heard reference to humans as "naked apes" because of our relative hairlessness, although technically we have more hair on our bodies than orangutans do, especially in the facial region.

Because gorillas and humans are so closely related, many infectious diseases can be transmitted from humans to gorillas and vice versa. That is why zoos like the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky keep their apes in glass enclosures -- to protect both the resident primates and the visiting primates! Additionally, baby gorillas receive the same vaccinations as baby humans, and adult gorillas get tetanus boosters.