Primates | Primates

Primaten | Primates

Mammals with a grasping hand: the thumb stands opposite the other fingers, the nails are flat rather than claw-shaped, and the fingertips carry sensitive pads ridged with fine lines that give purchase. The eyes face forward and their fields overlap, which yields depth; colour vision is good, while the muzzle and the sense of smell have both been reduced. The collarbone is retained and the shoulder joint is mobile, so the forelimb can be used in any direction and not merely to stand on. The brain is large for the body, and much of the behaviour is learned rather than brought into the world ready-made. The teeth are an omnivore's, with cusped cheekteeth and no shearing edges. Usually a single young is born, and it stays dependent on its mother for a long time.

Families in this order

Old World monkeys | Cercopithecidae1 speciesMonkeys with close-set nostrils that face downwards, an opposable thumb and flat nails on every finger and toe. Bare hardened sitting pads on the haunches let the animal sit and even sleep for hours; the tail is never prehensile. The cheekteeth carry two transverse ridges one behind the other, suited to leaves as well as fruit, and part of the family has roomy cheek pouches into which food can be stuffed quickly and chewed out at leisure elsewhere. They live in troops with a clear rank order in which grooming maintains the social bond. The only European species is the Barbary macaque: heavily furred, with the tail reduced to a stump, high in cedar forest and on bare mountainsides in the Maghreb, and with a small introduced population on the Rock of Gibraltar. In that species the males carry the infants about as well.