Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

Madagascar’s lemurs are prosimians – our most basic primate cousins. They evolved from an early offshoot of the main primate evolutionary path that subsequently went on to divide into the New World monkeys (simians that inhabit the Americas) and Old World monkeys (simians of Africa and Asia, which led to the evolution of all great apes, including us). Some fifty to sixty million years ago the ancestors of modern lemurs became isolated on the island of Madagascar. No one is quite sure how, but the most popular theory is they floated to the island on a raft of vegetation. This pioneering group of ancestral primates then evolved in isolation on this vast and relatively unpopulated island, radiating into a remarkable diversity of species from the tiny mouse lemur, Microcebus berthae, weighing no more than thirty paperclips (it is the world’s smallest primate), to one the size of a silverback gorilla, Archaeoindris fontoynontii (now sadly extinct). Jolly