|
( Primates)
A primate is any member of the biological order Primates, the group that contains all the species commonly related to the lemurs, monkeys, and apes, with the last category including humans.[2] Primates are found all over the world. Non-human primates occur mostly in Central and South America, Africa, and South Asia. A few species exist as far north in the Americas as southern Mexico, and as far north in Asia as northern Japan. The order Primates was established by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, in the tenth edition of his book Systema Naturae,[3] for the genera Homo (humans), Simia (other apes and monkeys), Lemur (prosimians) and Vespertilio (bats). In the first edition of the same book (1735), he had used the name Anthropomorpha for Homo, Simia and Bradypus (sloths).[4] In 1839, Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, following Linnaeus and imitating his nomenclature, established the orders Secundates (including the suborders Chiroptera, Insectivora and Carnivora), Tertiates (or Glires) and Quaternates (including Gravigrada, Pachydermata and Ruminantia),[5] but these new taxa were not accepted. The Latin primas means "one of the first, excellent, noble" (nominative plural primates). The English singular primate was derived via back-formation from the Latin inflected form.[6] The Primates order is divided informally into three main groupings prosimians, monkeys of the New World, and monkeys and apes of the Old World. The prosimians are species whose bodies most closely resemble that of the early proto-primates. The most well known of the prosimians, the lemurs, are located on the island of Madagascar and to a lesser extent on the Comoros Islands, isolated from the rest of the world. The New World monkeys include the familiar capuchin, howler, and squirrel monkeys. They live exclusively in the Americas. Discounting humans, the rest of the simians, the Old World monkeys and the apes, inhabit Africa and southern and central Asia, although fossil evidence shows many species existed in Europe as well.
|
Primates Subcategories
Primates Articles
|
|
