A Few More Mammal Notes: New World Monkeys

Sometimes I spend too many sleepless minutes looking up things that strike my fancy.

The New World Monkeys are the primates that developed in Central and South America after their (mysterious) migration(?) across an infantile Atlantic Ocean a while back. Migration is probably not the best word.

In any case, one of the two main defining characteristics of the NWM is the prehensile tail, the padded palm-like end that can curl around branches, turning the tail into a fifth grabbing-appendage. The prehensile tail only occurs in one of the four families of monkeys in the new world, while the other characteristic, the sideways-pointing nostrils, occurs in all of them.

One of the four families are the prehensile tail monkeys; the howler, the spider, and the wooly, each usually know with the word 'monkey' after their descriptors. The howler monkey is in the Guiness Book of World Records as being the loudest land animal, with its shrieks and howls audible up to three miles away. I guess they don't count the elephants with their low-frequency calls, inaudible to humans, that can travel up to ten miles.

Another family are the so-called night monkeys, some of the only nocturnal primates on earth. Not too much about these guys and gals.

Another family are the Cebids; marmocets and tamarins are the weird, miniature lions or goatee-wearing madmen of this small-monkey group, while the more normal-looking entries are the Capuchin and squirrel monkeys. The squirrel monkeys have the highest ratio of brain-mass to body-mass of any primate. Humans check in at a 1:35 ratio, pretty good for primates in general, while the squirrel monkey is more than twice that, at 1:17.

The last family are rather large, diurnal, and have tails that are generally much smaller in comparison to their bodies. Their names are things that don't usually hear, like Uakari, and titis, and Saki monkeys. 

Now, I'm told this picture is a Uakari monkey, but I don't know. I think it was professor or teacher of mine from the past. The nostril might be a give-away, though...