Chinese Stump-tailed Macaque (Macaca thibetana)

by JR Kinyak on August 13, 2008

in Primates

click image to enlarge

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This fuzzy fellow is called the Chinese stump-tailed macaque for reasons that would be obvious if you could see his backside. But he’s also known as the Tibetan macaque and Père David’s macaque. These macaques are frugivorous (they eat fruit) for the most part, but they’ll also eat some insects, leaves, and seeds when the situation warrants.

As for Père David, who inspired one of the Tibetan macaque’s common names, he was a Catholic missionary named Jean Pierre Armand David. He was a clergyman by profession and an all-around naturalist by passion. Père David, who died in 1900, seems to have been one of those now-all-too-rare “Renaissance souls” with a wide range of interests and fields of study. He was, apparently, the person who introduced Europe to the panda (or the panda to Europe), and in addition to zoology, he also studied botany, paleontology, and geology, and he was a beloved science teacher before being shipped off to China.

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 Leah 08.15.08 at 3:26 pm

I love the eyes of this Macaque!

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