A distinctive digit

The aye-aye is one of the ugliest and strangest of primates. A nocturnal lemur, it has a curious adaptation in the form of an elongated middle finger which is perfect for holding on to a coffee cup - No, wait. There are no paper coffee cups in the wild in Madagascar, so although that fellow at the Duke Lemur Center has found a civilized use for his unique digit, that can't be right, can it?

Right. In fact, what the aye-aye does is use its finger to tap on trees to find cavities within them that might contain tasty grubs. It uses its teeth to dig into the cavity, and then the long finger fishes out the food.

The finger is extremely sensitive to vibrations, and now some scientists have discovered that it has another unusual property. When the aye-aye is searching for food, the finger heats up by several degrees, but is much cooler at other times. In the thermal image, you can see that the finger is black - cooler than the rest of the animal - when it's not in use:

It remains to be determined exactly what the mechanism is for heating and cooling the finger, but as for reason, the researcher says "Like any delicate instrument, it is probably best deactivated when not in use."

Don't forget to stop and eat the roses

That's a Javan langur or Javan lutung, showing us that even an ugly animal can appreciate beauty, as long as it's tasty beauty, anyway. They also enjoy the smell, according to their keepers at Howletts and Port Lympne Wild Animal Parks in Kent.

This is a primate that we've only seen once on this blog, which is way too infrequently, given that even the babies are so wrinkled that they look like they're a hundred years old:


Aside from the wrinkles, some have mottled faces that looks like some other kind of skin disease, they've got that nose that looks like they were in a terrible nose-losing accident, and to top it off, they sport a variety of perfectly awful hairstyles, like this one:

Truly an ugly animal that's got it all.

Thanks to Flickr users Tombream07 and Tim Ellis and to the always interesting Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

-Wombat (No Relation)

First look at a rare ugly

Yeah, we usually try to have better pictures than that one. But this is a special occasion. These are the first pictures of a living Myanmar snub-nosed monkey.

We sort of met this monkey back in 2010 when its discovery was announced. But scientists had only found out about the species when a hunter brought them a dead one, so news stories were accompanied by a photo of a related species given a Photoshop dye job, to approximate the appearance of the new species in life.

The monkeys were well-known enough by the locals that they had a story about how to find them: They don't like to get rain in their sad, deformed-looking noses, because it makes them sneeze. So look for them when it's raining and follow the sound of the sneezes.

Scientists decided instead to set out camera traps, but there are so few of these monkeys in existence that they didn't actually hope for much. So these pictures are quite exciting, especially the ones that show that more of these exceedingly rare primates are being born:

Not great photographic art, sure, but great ugly animal news.

-Wombat(No Relation)

Ugly self-portraits

That animal's not only ugly, it's a brazen thief, and vain to boot. This crested black macaque in Indonesia stole a photographer's camera, and what did it do with it? Took a bunch of pictures of itself. Most of the hundreds of photos were out of focus, but you can check out a few more good ones at The Telegraph and The Daily Mail.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Origins of the Pekingese: A Love Story

Ah, the Pekingese.

Photo source: Petfinder.com

The ancient toy dog breed beloved of the Chinese Imperial court. Whence came its flat face and bow-legged gait, characteristics of the breed for over 2,000 years? According to legend,

A lion and a marmoset fell in love. But the lion was too large. The lion went to the Buddha and told him of his woes. The Buddha allowed the lion to shrink down to the size of the marmoset. And the Pekingese was the result.

Photos courtesy of My Opera and the Amazona Zoo

Photo source: Good Dog Care

A less common version of the story substitutes a butterfly for the marmoset, but I think the family resemblance is more obvious in the marmoset version.

Salute to Tarsiers

It's time for a full-length feature on everyone's (okay, my) favorite tiny primate: the tarsier.

Photo source: Simba Nia's blog

Those of you with nerdy inclinations will recognize them from the covers of O'Reilly's books on Vi and Unix.

They've also been featured on I Can Haz Cheezburger:



Tarsiers are small, nocturnal primates whose 4-7 species live in the islands of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and the Philippines. Trademarks of their appearance are enormous eyes (which can outsize their brains), long feet (which give them their name--their tarsus [ankle] bones are extremely elongated), and long, spindly fingers.


Photo source: That's Just Ugly

Tarsiers possess an abundance of exceptional traits. They can rotate their necks 180 degrees in either direction. They are the world's most carnivorous primate, exclusively eating live animals that include insects, snakes and other reptiles, amphibians, and even birds. They are primarily insectivorous.

They give birth to giant babies that can weigh 25-30% of the mother's weight (imagine a >30 pound human newborn!). According to Tarsiers: Past, Present, and Future, "Since infants are so heavy, mothers and other group members rarely transport them. Instead, a mother will park her infant on branches while she forages nearby."

Photo uploaded by flickr user Specklet

As if all this weren't enough, tarsiers have incited a raging century-long debate over their proper phylogeny, or relationship to other primates. Some argue that their morphology shows their close relatedness to strepsirrhine primates (e.g. lemurs, lorises, and bush babies). Another camp scoffs at such absurdity and cites genetic, anatomical, and reproductive traits that make them haplorrhine primates (e.g. monkeys, apes, and humans).

Photo source: Asia Finest

Their ugliness factor also remains controversial; I personally find them to be utterly adorable, but, incredibly, others have ranked them the world's fourth ugliest animal.

Photo source: Animal Hub

They've also been featured on these illustrious pages before. So here's to tarsiers! May they never lack for crickets to chew.

Not just an ugly face

Nothing could please me more than a reason to post about proboscis monkeys. But I could never have imagined such a good reason: this headline at Discovery News:

Monkey Barfs and Rechews Food

A Japanese scientist studying a troop of these monkeys on Borneo has discovered that they regurgitate their food and basically chew their cud. They don't have the multi-chambered stomach designed for this like cows do, but they don't care. They do it anyway.

Don't believe it? You need to see for yourself? OK, it isn't pretty, but that's what you come here for, I guess:



Great angle on the nose in that, too, right?

I hope you appreciate the lengths that science goes to to bring you this sort of news. The researcher, Ikki Matsuda, told LiveScience what it took:

There are, of course, a lot of mosquitoes and leeches in the forest. The rainy season was the worst — the river water came up to our waists even inside the forest. It was really scary because at that time, crocodiles also came into the inland forest, and many creatures like centipedes and spiders came up to me on the water.

Yeah, I think I'll stick with the blogging.

Gratefully,
Wombat (No Relation)

Proboscis monkey in all his glory by Flickr user chem7 .

Someone get these guys a makeover

One of my highly placed media sources suggested that we might be interested in this video, and I couldn't agree more. Poor things, who does their hair?

(Those are Zanzibar red colobus monkeys, and you can quit at about the one minute mark if all you care about is ugly animals.)

Not that I have any right to talk,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Muted by monkeys

I never expected to come across animals so ugly that they leave me at a loss for words, but these monkeys have done it.

This photo was taken at Emei Mountain Park, Sichuan Province, China, home to a Chinese species of macaque. I wondered if perhaps this information from Wikipedia explained why this mother and child are so terrifically unattractive:

Visitors to Mount Emei will likely see dozens of monkeys who can often be viewed taking food from tourists. Local merchants sell nuts for tourists to feed the monkeys. Some monkeys may be seen eating human food such as potato chips and even drinking soda from discarded bottles. While most of the monkeys look healthy, other monkeys appear out of shape from apparently being fed human food that is not native to the monkey's natural habitat.

But the entry also helpfully supplies a photo of another baby:


That little guy looks perfectly healthy.... and perfectly hideous. So apparently they do come by it naturally.

Almost speechlessly,
-Wombat (No Relation)

Thanks (I think) to the Telegraph's Pictures of the Day.

Monkey Halloween

Scientists have discovered another species of those tragic snub-nosed monkeys that look like victims of plastic surgery gone horribly wrong. And this one comes with such a sad story:

Many people assured us that this species was
particularly easy to find when it was raining. The
monkeys reportedly tend to get rainwater in their
upturned noses, to which they respond with audible
sneezes. To avoid getting rainwater in their noses,
the monkeys allegedly spend rainy days sitting with
their heads tucked face-down between their knees.

The new species is called Rhinopithecus strykeri, but that's not exactly a picture of it. Unfortunately, the scientists only got pictures of a dead one, so this image sent to the media is a related species, the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti), given a Photoshop dye job to approximate the appearance in life of the new species. Here's the original:


So, basically, what you've got there is an old kind of monkey dressed up as a new kind of monkey. Someone ought to give it some candy bars as a Halloween reward, don't you think?

-Wombat (No Relation)

Photos from Live Science and the American Journal of Primatology.

Hard Not To Stare

It would be hard not to stare, wouldn't it? Like talking to someone with a growth on their face, it's hard not to stare. But little monkey had better be careful, lest mommy should come to an abrupt halt. You don't want a face full of that.

Why do some monkey species have red butts? For some, it's a sign that a female is sexually mature. For others, the rear becomes nice and swollen, and it's used as padding for sitting (I've got similar padding, though not due to swelling or redness).

Photo source: ALAgrApHY

Ugdorable? Aye Aye, Sir!

Thanks to Zooborns for the news that a baby aye-aye has been born at the Philadelphia Zoo!

The aye-aye is a nocturnal prosimian (the same family as the much less ugly lemurs). Their keepers seem generally to have a sense of humor about them, which you see in the names they give their charges: this little guy is called Smeagol and his mom is Medusa.

For more info on the aye-aye and his relatives, check out the Duke Primate Center.


-Wombat (No Relation)

Advice to the ugly

I almost hesitated to post this picture for two reasons. One is that the mission of this blog specifically excludes the "maimed," and apparently I am not the first to think that this animal looks like the victim of either a tragic accident or plastic surgery gone horribly wrong.

But this is the totally natural, unaltered appearance of the Tonkin Snub-Nosed Monkey, and I figured I better go ahead and post it because this animal may not be with us for much longer.

It's classified as critically endangered, one of the 25 most endangered primate species in the world, and only a couple of hundred individuals remain in five isolated locations in Vietnam. It's so rare that it was believed extinct until its rediscovery in the 1990s.

This monkey isn't one of those animals that's going extinct because no one is paying attention. The group Flora and Fauna International has been working on its preservation for years, and even discovered a new population in 2008. But they recently announced that it's on the brink of extinction in one district, down to 20-30 monkeys.

The species is threatened by habitat loss and also by hunting, even though it's reported to taste pretty ugly too, so it's not killed for food. But it seems like its worst problem is that it doesn't know who its enemies are. One researcher reports that unlike most animals that are threatened by hunting, these monkeys didn't flee when they encountered her.

So there's the second reason I hesitated to write about this guy: I don't want to be part of his problem. So let me be clear to any Tonkin Snub-Nosed Monkeys that are reading: There may be some of us who love you, but if you see a human, don't stick around to chat about whether they read Ugly Overload. Just RUN AWAY.

(See a bunch more pictures here and thanks to @SpeciesoftheDay for the inspiration.)

-Your ugly primate friend,
Wombat (No Relation)

Happy Ugly Fourth of July

Hope you're all enjoying some nice cold summer treats like this baboon at Hangzhou Wild Animal Zoo in China.

Selected for your enjoyment from the Telegraph's Animal Pictures of the Week by your friend Wombat (No Relation).

Those Eyes

Monkey face, monkey hair, monkey hands. But those eyes. So human. He looks so pensive, so contemplative. I wonder what he's thinking about. His captivity? How nice it is not to have to worry about being eaten by a jungle cat? Bananas? Throwing his feces?

I don't know. But those eyes...

Photo source: Mark

Underrated

Monkeys are severely underrated when it comes to hairdos. Take this critically endangered southern-bearded sakis monkey for instance. He comes equipped with two ends upon which to sit.

Much like some coworkers I've had in the past.

Thanks for the link, Susan.

Photo source: Telegraph.co.uk

Means and Propriety

I'm sure this silverback gorilla is just yawning. But you've got to give respect to a beast that is seven times your strength, with fangs that large, and with a jaw that can open that wide. Couple all that with the fact that that green stain on his upper lip just above his middle teeth is residue from some poo he was eating earlier, and you've got a beast with both the means and the lack of propriety needed to rend you apart.

Photo source: Hauke Steinberg

The AP Is Watching

I think the AP is watching this blog. I post on spider monkeys, then they feature spider monkeys. Or is it just synchronicity? I think I'll try posting on how I won a million dollars and see what they do with that. Though, their article might reference a California man who was killed by his relatives when he wouldn't share his bounty with them.

Regardless, enjoy that scabrous face. I'm off to go get a popsicle.

Photo source: Felipe Dana

Barking, Whinnies, and Screams

Sean McCann took this photo of a female spider monkey in Nouragues, French Guiana. Wikipedia states that the spider monkey has recently garnered the title of the most intelligent of the New World monkeys. They are also the largest New World monkey (or among the largest)with those oversized (ergo spider) limbs.

Combine that intelligence with brachiation and their barking, whinnies, and prolonged screaming, and you've got a monkey that would drop property values in a hurry if they infested your neighborhood. I'll stick with belligerent tom cats and yappy terriers.

The Mighty Mandrill

Photo source: Willie Stark
Mandrill's are the world's largest monkeys and arguably the world's most colorful mammals. They are blessedly shy and reclusive...blessedly because I know that the branch it is gnawing could easily be my forearm.

They live in large groups dominated by a single male. One such group (documented on film) was estimated as being comprised of upwards of 1,300 individuals. That constitutes the largest single population of non-human primates known. That male is probably also the busiest primate on the planet.

Those enormous fangs come in handy during self-defense. But baring them to other mandrills is usually meant as a friendly greeting. I'll settle for a simple handshake, Mr. Mandrill.