Primates: Quick ID guide to Africa's great apes, true monkeys and their relatives, by Chris and Mathilde Stuart.

Primates. Quick ID guide to Africa's great apes, true monkeys and their relatives, by Chris and Mathilde Stuart. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Struik Nature. Cape Town, South Africa 2022. ISBN 9781775847939 / ISBN 978-1-77-584793-9

Primates: Quick ID guide to Africa's great apes, true monkeys and their relatives, by Chris and Mathilde Stuart, introduces you to primate species that you are most likely to see in Africa. It has been designed to help you make positive IDs at a glance, by providing key information together with distribution maps and photographs showing diagnostic features.

Chris Stuart  Tilde Stuart  

Primates are relatively recent denizens of planet Earth, with the most primitive - the prosimians - appearing in the fossil record 50 to 55 million years before the present (BP). Although a great variety of prosimians occurred at the time, the emergence of the first ancestors of the monkeys - some 33.9 million years BP, in the Oligocene - introduced greater competition for resources among primates. The prosimians in many areas switched to a nocturnal lifestyle to avoid the diurnal monkeys. By the early Miocene, from about 23 million years BP, apes were beginning to evolve from monkeys. They in turn displaced the monkeys, pushing them into less favourable habitats. By the late Miocene, up to 5.3 million years BP, our direct ancestors, the hominins, had begun their rise to become the dominant primate species, with a present-day count of some 7.8 billion humans (Homo sapiens) - many more than all other primates put together. Homo sapiens is the most destructive primate that has ever lived, and many of our fellow primates are teetering on the brink of extinction because of our actions. Primates have adapted to many different habitats and several species coexist. They evolved to maintain diversity without undue competition for food. Simply put, in forest environments (where the majority of primates live) they share the space by feeding at different levels, selecting different foods, and foraging at different times. The prosimians are nocturnal, the monkeys and apes diurnal. Even the galagos - with up to five species in some forests - can coexist. Apart from feeding at different levels, the galagos eat different food: some specialise in eating invertebrates and others feed on fruits. The diurnal primates are similarly adapted to coexistence. For example, the colobus monkeys are primarily leaf-eaters, the mangabeys include very hard seeds in their diet (for which they have powerful dentition), and the largest of all, the gorillas, are primarily vegetarian. Most primates are social, living in family groups or large troops, with the record for the largest primate congregation being held by the grass-eating gelada, with up to 1,200 individuals gathering in a herd. Most primates give birth to a single young at a time, but some prosimians have more than one. Africa's primates face numerous threats including major habitat loss, hunting for bushmeat, and the exotic pet trade. No accurate figures are available, but thousands of primates are commercially hunted annually for the bushmeat trade across much of sub-Saharan Africa. None of the primates are spared, from the small galagos to the gorillas, with the illegal trade supporting thousands of people in poverty-stricken communities. Law enforcement is largely non-existent in many regions where primates and other wildlife are hunted. Most at risk are the forest-dwelling primates. The threat is even greater on the island of Madagascar, where many of the 100 or so lemur species face extinction.

This is an excerpt from Primates, quick ID guide to Africa's great apes, true monkeys and their relatives, by Chris and Mathilde Stuart.

Title: Primates
Subtitle: Quick ID guide to Africa's great apes, true monkeys and their relatives
Author: Chris Stuart; Mathilde Stuart
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Struik Nature
Cape Town, South Africa 2022
ISBN 9781775847939 / ISBN 978-1-77-584793-9
Softcover, 10 x 18 cm, 40 pages, throughout colour photographs