Facts about Primates

Non-human primates occur mostly in Central and South America, Africa, and southern Asia.

All primates, even those that lack the features typical of other primates (like lorises), share eye orbit characteristics, such as a postorbital bar, that distinguish them from other taxonomic orders.

The prosimians are species whose bodies most closely resemble that of the early proto-primates.

Apes are the members of the Hominoidea superfamily of primates.

All primates have five fingers (pentadactyl), a generalized dental pattern, and an unspecialized body plan.

Colin Groves (2001) lists about 350 species of primates in Primate Taxonomy.

Many modern species of primates live mostly in trees and hardly ever come to the ground.

The earliest fossils of primates date to the late Cretaceous period (Mayr 2001).

Prosimians are generally considered the most primitive extant (living) primates, representing forms that were ancestral to monkeys and apes.

Other lineages of lower primates once inhabited Earth.

All living members of the Hylobatidae and Hominidae are tailless, and thus humans have been referred to as tailless, bipedal, primates.

The second stayed in Africa, where they developed into the Old World primates.

The suborder Strepsirrhini, the "wet-nosed" primates, split off from the primitive primate line about 63 million years ago (mya).

The English singular, primate, is a back-formation from the Latin name Primates, which itself was the plural of the Latin primas ("one of the first, excellent, noble").

A few other primates have the word "ape" in their common names, but they are not regarded as true apes.

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 three basic groups of primates are prosimians, New World monkeys, and Old World monkeys and apes.

The suborder Haplorrhini, the "dry-nosed" primates, is composed of two sister clades.

Despite this, effort is sometimes made to consider humans "just primates," to the extent that efforts are actually being made to legally define other primates as "persons."

Despite this, however, thousands of primates are used every year around the world in scientific experiments because of their similarity to humans.

A primate (L. prima, first) is any mammal of the biological order Primates, the group that contains all the species commonly related to the lemurs, monkeys, and apes, with the latter category including humans.

Some primates, such the Rhesus Macaque and the Hanuman Langur, are common in cities and villages.