"Look, it's a monkey!" The father says to his son, pointing at the caged chimpanzee meeting with his back to the onlookers. The information sheeted posted on the partition corrects the misnomer, but I qualm the man will read it. Sure enough, the brace strolls farther to look at the next 'monkey,' which is certainly a chimp.

With more than 350 species of primates in the world, I postulate it is painless to get befuddled over who is who, and what is what. However, as a mandrill myself I have to marvel if our cousins are as disgusted as we are when we're mistakenly called by the immoral name, or assumed-because of resemblance-to be connected to somebody we detest. Highly speculative. Nevertheless in the tradition of biased correctness I will venture in this paragraph to represent a monkey primer. I know that a monkey by any name will never smell very pleasant, but something about aware my gorillas from my gibbons puts everything in its correct place, and helps me feel as if the world has order.

What Makes a Primate? Primates are mammals which divide the following combination of persona: their hands and feet have five apparent digits; they have fingernails and a divergent thumb; they possess binocular idea with eyes positioned at the front of their faces; they have a generalized dental archetype; their shoulder joints are unusually bendable due to assured globe joints and powerful collarbones; and they have an obvious affinity near erectness, or bipedalism. Other than these major commonalities, there is great variation within this order, and even scientists sometimes have difficulty classifying primates.

In general, primates can be alienated into five divisions. Listing from the most ancient to the most compound, these divisions are: prosimians, monkeys, slighter apes, great apes, and humans. If you can simply identify members of your own class, I will focus on the first four program.

Prosimians are slightest possible to be identified as primates, and involve about fifty species of lemurs, lorises and bushbabies of Africa and Asia. They are the smallest of the mandrill bunch-an adult pygmy mouse lemur would fit comfortably in your hand. They have shorter arms than legs, with effective hindquarters good for leaping and clinging to ranking trunks. Their noses are wet and snout-like, and they have the relatively good brains of smell, in comparison to the other primates. Most species are nocturnal, with large, light-reflecting eyes.

The 200+ species of monkeys are classified as New World or Old World. New World monkeys are found in South or Central America, and embrace marmosets, tamarins, and capuchins, among other monkeys (collector, blunder, and owl monkeys are some of the better known species.) Old World monkeys inhabit Africa and Asia, and include baboons, macaques, and colobus monkeys. As a general control, monkeys are slighter than apes, and they have prehensile tails. They scamper from division to topic on all four limbs, much like cats and dogs do. On the evolutionary line to humans, monkeys split off a long time before apes.

Gibbons are sometimes called "minor apes." While their skulls and teeth resemble those of the great apes, and they need tails, gibbons are smaller, couple-bonded, and do not make nests. In these habits they are more like monkeys. Gibbons reside in trees and are known for their dexterity at brachiating, or wavering from diverge to separate-sometimes at speeds up to 35 miles per hour. There are about twelve different species of gibbons.

About fourteen species of great apes inhabit Africa and Asia, counting gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and chimpanzees. Apes are the main of the mandrill family. A male brute could weigh up to 400 pounds and withstand 5 1/2 feet tall. They are broad-chested, and have arms that are longer than their legs. Unlike gibbons and monkeys, the great apes live primarily on the ground, sleeping in individual nests. With a better qualified head than other primates (excluding humans), ape groups advantage dense shared lives, start tools, use idiom, and resolve evils. Chimpanzees divide 98% of DNA with humans, and are hence frequently used in scientific experimentation, while this controversial repeat is under amplified scrutiny.

Except for humans, which are the most dominant and successful group of primates on earth, all other monkey species face challenges concerning their locale loss. Diverse and single, our primate relatives will resume to fascinate maneuvering us.