All posts tagged: primate

Chimp Slasher Flick ‘Primate’ Hits Streaming. Warning: This Ain’t No Punch the Monkey Story

Chimp Slasher Flick ‘Primate’ Hits Streaming. Warning: This Ain’t No Punch the Monkey Story

Published by skeptic

If you’ve been yearning to watch a horror film about a killer animal similar in tone to, say, Stephen King’s Cujo, I’ve got some good news for you. Primate will stream soon. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re in for a ride. Primate follows a pretty simple story: A group of friends is repeatedly attacked by Ben, the family chimpanzee. As you can see from the trailer below, the cute pet turns savage and does some unspeakable things to the folks he used to cohabit peacefully with. This ain’t no cuddly Punch the monkey story. And for that matter, it’s no Bubbles story either, but never mind, go ask your parents. Johnny Sequoyah stars alongside Jessica Alexander, Oscar-winner Troy Kotsur, Victoria Wyant, Gia Hunter, Benjamin Chang, Charlie Mann, Tienne Simon and Miguel Torres Umba, who plays Ben. The film is helmed by The Strangers: Prey at Night director Johannes Roberts. Keep reading for more info on when Primate will premiere and how to watch it with a VPN. When to watch Primate …

New fossil findings help clarify the history of primate evolution

New fossil findings help clarify the history of primate evolution

Published by Jenni Sidey

A few teeth, smaller than a grain of rice, are changing the map of your earliest primate relatives. They come from a creature called Purgatorius, a tiny tree-dwelling mammal that lived about 66 million years ago, right after the dinosaurs vanished. For decades, fossils of this animal turned up only in northern places like Montana and Saskatchewan. That left a big blank space farther south, where some scientists suspected Purgatorius simply was not there. Now, that blank space has a dot. A team led by paleontologist Stephen Chester, an anthropology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, reports the southernmost Purgatorius fossils ever found. They were recovered from Colorado’s Denver Basin, at the Corral Bluffs study area. The work appears as the cover article in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, with co-authors Jordan Crowell, Tyler Lyson, and David Krause of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. A lifelike rendering of the archaic primate Purgatorius. (CREDIT: Andrey Atuchin.) The teeth that moved the boundary The new specimens are not skulls or skeletons. They …

The odd ways mammals descend trees and what it means for primate evolution

The odd ways mammals descend trees and what it means for primate evolution

Published by Jenni Sidey

A monkey descending a tree trunk often keeps its head up, moving almost like a cautious climber backing down a ladder. Squirrels and many other mammals, by contrast, tend to go headfirst. That difference turns out to carry clues about how primates evolved their distinctive upright postures. A new comparative analysis of tree-dwelling mammals, published in eLife, examined how animals move down vertical supports such as trunks and vines. The research compared 21 arboreal species, from primates to rodents and marsupials, making it the first broad study to analyze both upward and downward climbing across many mammal groups. The results point to a pattern shaped not just by body size, but by evolutionary history and anatomy. “While not all arboreal mammals traverse narrow terminal branches, they all rely on vertical supports to reach tree canopies,” said lead author Séverine Toussaint of the Center for Research on Paleontology in Paris. “Their ability to safely descend sloping and vertical supports remains important, yet largely understudied.” Two species from the study – a raccoon (Procyon lotor) and mongoose …

This wide-eyed baby primate is cute, cuddly—and venomous

This wide-eyed baby primate is cute, cuddly—and venomous

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. As 2025 drew to a close, the Bronx Zoo in New York welcomed one of the most adorable animals you could imagine into the world: a pygmy slow loris (Nycticebus pygmaeus).  In the picture shared by the zoo, the tiny endangered primate baby stares out with its giant dark eyes so intensely you’d think it was born with its eyes open. Indeed, that’s exactly how slow lorises come out—as well as completely covered in fur. Mothers hold infants on their stomachs, occasionally placing them on a branch as they forage—and, who are we kidding, likely take a break.  The baby pygmy slow loris was born in December 2025. Image: Bronx Zoo / WCS. The image seems to have captured exactly that moment, with the young pygmy slow loris clinging to its branch the same way a preteen anxiously clings to a grocery cart in line for the cash register while mom sprints back to aisle three for a forgotten …