Quote: Huxley on traveler's tales and primate discovery
Thomas Huxley devoted his 1863 book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, to describing what was then known about the anatomy and biology of the living apes...
All posts tagged with orangutans
Orangutan loris capture and meat-eating
Madeleine Hardus and colleagues Hardus:2012 describe long-term observations of hunting by Sumatran orangutans.
Orangutan dynamics of Borneo
Bornean and Sumatran orangutans are the most highly divergent subspecies within any of the living species of great apes. The two farther apart even than chim...
Mailbag: Parallel knuckle-walkers
Regarding convergent evolution in the great apes, I thought it was well demonstrated that knuckle walking was convergent, because the mechanisms for spinal s...
Swimming orangutans
New Scientist is running a gallery of orangutans interacting in water. These are orphaned orangutans that were relocated to an island and have since been obs...
Orangutan facts
Current Biology has a Q and A with orangutan researcher Anne Russon. It’s a good discussion to freshen one’s knowledge of orangutan behavior. Here’s an inter...
Orangutan music
One step closer to Ewoks:
Videos of the week
I’ve been sent two videos this week by several readers. I post them here together – I’ve never embedded video before, and after some experimentation I didn’t...
Orangutans coming out of the woodwork
A reader forwarded this AP story about a new orangutan count for a relatively unexplored corner of Borneo:
A Neanderthal droog?
The Telegraph has a Roger Highfield article about those zany Neanderthals.
Sinking ape subspecies
In a less recognized article in Current Biology, Fischer et al. (2006) report on the genetic diversity of ape subspecies.
Genetics of orangutan demographic collapse
I'm reading a new paper by Benoit Goossens and colleagues (2006) in PLoS Biology, called "Genetic signature of anthropogenic population collapse in orang-ut...
Carel van Schaik interview in Times
Nice interview touching on Carel van Schaik's new book, Among Orangutans : Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture. Much on van Schaik's observations of oran...
Wild primate urine sampling tenth worst science job
From the "any publicity is good publicity" department: Popular Science's list of the worst jobs in science includes "Orangutan-pee collector".