Baby baboon tongue

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Smile!

Picture: KPA / ZUMA / REX FEATURES

Cute or not? Baby red-haired baboon

On January 26, Israel's Ramat Gan Safari announced the birth of a rare, adorable red-haired baby girl. Just like humans, the gene for red hair amongst Hamadryas Baboons is recessive and it was exactly 30 years ago when the last red-haired baboon was born at the old Tel Aviv Zoo. (via ZooBorns)

Fursday Fun

Photograph: Theo Allofs/Corbis

The first service monkey?

When the Cape Government Railways opened the first railway line to Port Elizabeth from Cape Town during the later part of the 1800’s the town Uitenhage was established. The railway station became world renown when the local railway guard James Edwin Wide had a working baboon Jack the Signalman that assisted him in his daily tasks. Wide had lost both legs in an accident when fell underneath a moving train. His determination and his perseverance forced him to make his own pegged-legs from a piece of wood that was strapped onto his lower half of his body. He also made himself a trolley with an intricate hand apparatus that made him a little more mobile. Wide acquired a young baboon, named him Jack, and proceeded to train Jack to perform all the duties required to run the station. Not only did Jack get his monthly rations from the government but he also received an employment number. During 1890 Jack got sick and contracted tuberculosis and died, Wide was inconsolable to the loss of his friend as they were inseparable. Jack’s skull is on display in the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. Source (via Culture Dish) Photo Source

Banana breath

How cute is this? Baby baboons eating bananas at the National Zoo in Havana.

How Baboons Think

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, have spent 14 years observing the Moremi baboons. Through ingenious playback experiments performed by themselves and colleagues, the researchers say they have worked out many aspects of what baboons use their minds for, along with their limitations. Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have summed up their new cycle of research in a book titled “Baboon Metaphysics.” Their conclusion, based on many painstaking experiments, is that baboons’ minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it. “Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.” NY Times