Mad About Monkeys: A Loving Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weird and Wonderful Kindred Creatures
A captivating primer on our fellow primates, from belligerent baboons to brilliant macaques.
by Maria Popova
“We share this planet we call home with an astonishing array of equally astonishing creatures. But, perhaps because we judge everything by our solipsistic human criteria, few elicit our admiring fascination more potently than monkeys — our fellow primates, which evolved some 35 million years ago; we share with them a distant common ancestor, from which we diverged on our separate evolutionary paths. (But, contrary to a common misconception, we did not evolve from monkeys.)
In Mad About Monkeys (public library), a wonderful addition to the best children’s books celebrating science, British illustratorOwen Davey presents a stunning and richly informative primer on these marvelous primates. However wildly different the 260 known species of monkeys may be from one another and from us, we continue to share surprising commonality with these distant cousins — from our highly networked societies to our capacity for play, that peculiar activity serving no other purpose than providing pleasure and delight.
Davey traces how their evolutionary history set monkeys apart from gibbons, lemurs, and chimpanzees — lest we forget, Jane Goodall has spent a good chunk of her career patiently debunking the popular misconception that chimps are monkeys — and how monkeys migrated from Africa to Asia to North America to develop into the distinctly different Old World and New World classes” (read more).
(Source: Brain Pickings)

















