The Species Seekers Quiz: Discovering the Golden Monkey
Who discovered the golden monkey?
1. Henri Milne-Edwards
2. Alfred Russell Wallace
3. Patrick Manson
4. Pére Armand David
And the answer is
The golden monkey was familiar to Europeans from images in Chinese paintings and porcelains, but according to David's translator Helen M. Fox, it was "so odd that it was thought to be an imaginary animal." It had a small bluish-white face surrounded by a fringe of flame red hair, and whereas all other known primates were tropical, these lichen-eating monkeys lived, David wrote, "in trees in the highest mountains, now white with snow." The golden monkey became Rhinopithecus roxellana. The French naturalist Henri Milne-Edwards chose the species name to commemorate the Ukrainian wife of an Ottoman Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, because monkey and wife both had distinctive up-turned noses. To some, the discovery and naming of these species may seem like an act of cultural appropriation. But read why that's not entirely so, in The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.
