LA Weekly gives us a rundown of the top primate news stories of 2005.
This story is good:
Contagious Yawning
Science has yet to explain why humans yawn, or why we yawn when we see other people yawn. What we do now know is that both great apes and the lesser primates (macaques and lemurs) also yawn contagiously.
But my favorite is this:
Giganto
Gigantopithecus blacki (a.k.a. Giganto) was a prehistoric ape that stood 12 feet tall and weighed 1,200 pounds. Giganto’s fossil remains were first discovered in 1935 in a Hong Kong pharmacy, and paleontologists long thought the species died out a million years ago. But this year researchers learned that the creature lived as recently as 100,000 years ago — side by side with modern Homo sapiens, i.e., us. Could he still be roaming the forests of the Pacific Northwest?
Did you have to post about monkeys and contagious yawning? Now I’m doing it. 🙂