All posts tagged: primates

Pregnant gorillas undergo ultrasounds and the results might look familiar

Pregnant gorillas undergo ultrasounds and the results might look familiar

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. When Sachita Shah sent her cardiologist brother an ultrasound of her patient’s heart, he was very confused. The heart was huge, and the left ventricle incredibly muscular. His confusion was warranted, as the ultrasound was not of a human heart. It belonged to another primate—a gorilla. Shah, emergency physician and VP of Global Health at medical equipment manufacturer Butterfly Network, tells Popular Science that if she had shown an ultrasound of a gorilla fetus to a radiologist, they would have assumed it was a human baby.  Shah is on the gorilla care team currently looking after Jamani and Olympia, two western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) mothers at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington. Jamani gave birth on Monday May 18, and Olympia …

Primates may have evolved in the cold

Primates may have evolved in the cold

Published by skeptic

ancestor: A predecessor. It could be a family forebear, such as a parent, grandparent or great-great-great grandparent. Or it could be a species, genus, family or other order of organisms from which some later one evolved. For instance, ancient dinosaurs are the ancestors of today’s birds. (antonym: descendant) ape: A group of rather large primates, all of which lack a tail. They include gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gibbons and humans. Most people tend to group humans into their own separate subcategory owing to a number of special traits. These include a larger brain, greater mental abilities (including being able to talk) and their ability to walk on two legs. biologist: A scientist involved in the study of living things. climate: The weather conditions that typically exist in one area, in general, or over a long period. colleague: Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member. common ancestor: Also known as shared ancestor. It’s an ancestor that two or more descendants have in common. Two siblings share a parent as a common ancestor. This also applies …

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 …

Our love of crystals goes back at least 6 million years

Our love of crystals goes back at least 6 million years

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Primates of all stripes really love their crystals. Archeologists have found the shiny rocks at dig sites dating back as long as 780,000 years ago. Although, we are still not sure if our ancestors used them as tools, weapons, or jewelry.  To learn more, a team of scientists in Spain turned to one of our closest primate ancestors—chimpanzees. Their experiments revealed that chimps raised alongside humans can tell the difference between crystals and other stones. The findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, and could reveal more about our own fascination with these shiny symmetrical stones.  “We were pleasantly surprised by how strong and seemingly natural the chimpanzees’ attraction to crystals was,” Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, a study co-author and crystallographer at Donostia International Physics Center, said in a statement. “This suggests that sensitivity to such objects may have deep evolutionary roots.” Crystal vs. rock Our species derived from chimpanzees between six and …

Chimpanzees love alcohol and their pee proves it

Chimpanzees love alcohol and their pee proves it

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Chimpanzees love their alcohol. Among our closest primate relatives, they frequently feast on fermented fruit in the wild. So much so that the drunken monkey hypothesis posits that chimps and potentially many other animals will ingest alcohol as part of their diet and even seek it out. And as descendants of boozy, fruit-eating apes ourselves, humans likely evolved the same tendency. Now, some more proof of their intoxicating habits is in their urine. After University of California, Berkeley graduate student Aleksey Maro and integrative biologist Robert Dudley discovered that the boozy fruits chimpanzees eat is the equivalent of two standard alcoholic drinks (14 grams), they needed to confirm the full amount of  alcohol consumed by the monkeys. Since breathalyzers are not really practical for wild chimpanzees, they turned to their urine. Staying clear of the spray zone In August 2025, Maro worked with Sharifah Namaganda, a Ugandan graduate student at the University of Michigan who had prior experience collecting …

Blue-faced, puffy-lipped monkey scores a rare conservation win

Blue-faced, puffy-lipped monkey scores a rare conservation win

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. For once, there’s good news in animal conservation. A population of Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus avunculus)—critically endangered primates with colorful faces and big lips—is stable.  This news is particularly welcome, given the fact that the funny-looking species isn’t just critically endangered. Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys are among the most endangered primates in existence. Most of the species are limited to two primary areas in northern Vietnam’s karst limestone peaks—Quan Ba Forest and Khau Ca Species and Habitat Conservation Area.  A new population census by the wildlife conservation charity Fauna & Flora verified that Tonkin snub-nosed monkey numbers in the Khau Ca Species and Habitat Conservation Area are stable. There are approximately 160 of these primates in the conservation area, according to the latest census. The survey took place outside of the species’ breeding season and spotted some infants.  Tonkin snub-nosed monkey census 2025 The 19-day survey saw a collaboration between Fauna & Flora’s conservation team and local community groups and …

Humans are the only primates with a chin – now we finally know why

Humans are the only primates with a chin – now we finally know why

Published by skeptic

The human chin is an evolutionary oddity Westend61/Getty Images Humans are the only primates with a chin, leaving biologists to wonder why we acquired this unique feature. According to a new analysis of head anatomy in apes, it probably didn’t evolve for a specific reason of its own but instead emerged as a side effect of other changes driven by natural selection. “There has been a tendency to assume that every feature that differs significantly between species has been shaped by natural selection for a specific purpose, but this ‘purposeful’ view of evolution is inaccurate,” says Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel at the University at Buffalo in New York state. “Evolution is often messier and less directed than people expect or assume.” In simple terms, the chin is a bony projection of the lower jaw that extends beyond the front teeth. Even among our closest relatives, no other human species has a chin, so it has been used as a key identifying feature of Homo sapiens, but the reason why this trait evolved is a mystery. Some …

Trump Condemned Over ‘Disgusting’ Video Of Obamas As Primates

Trump Condemned Over ‘Disgusting’ Video Of Obamas As Primates

Published by Sam Flores

Donald Trump drew fierce condemnation on Friday after he went on a social media-sharing rampage on his Truth Social platform that included a clip parroting his 2020 election conspiracy theories — but which also depicted former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as primates. The 62-second clip cut briefly at the 59-second point to show footage of the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the animals’ bodies. It is set to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The full video can be seen here. Trump, for years, boosted the baseless and racist birther theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore an illegitimate president. Critics said his posting of the video showed “there’s no bottom.” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s (Democrat) press office slammed it as “disgusting behaviour by the President” and called on “every single Republican” to denounce it. Others agreed: Source link

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 …

Penis size may matter more to men than women

Penis size may matter more to men than women

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Human history is full of juvenile jokes, odd stereotypes, and outright harmful misinformation about the size of a man’s penis. But the long and short of the real science behind size suggests that men themselves are more likely than women to get riled up about the subject. According to a study published today in the journal PLOS Biology, men routinely feel more physically and sexually threatened by well-endowed rivals—regardless of how women feel about the subjects. For years, evolutionary biologists have remained confused by one peculiar aspect of human anatomy. In relation to overall body size, the human penis is usually larger than those belonging to most other primates. The reasons why have remained unclear, although there are plenty of theories related to attracting mates, warding off opponents, and even improving reproductive success. Examples of the computer-generated, male figures used in the study. Credit: Aich U, et al., 2025, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0 To better understand the psychological influences …