Adolescent Apes

Apes have a long childhood.

 Picture from Fine Art America

Great apes are born helpless and must be carefully nurtured by their mothers from the moment they are born.  A great ape is always with its mother during its first few years of infancy, and remain close for the years following, until it learns how to behave in it's community.

The Difference Between Apes and Monkeys

There are over 300 species of primates in the world, but there are a couple of distinctive differences that separate apes from monkeys. Apes don't have tails and are generally a lot larger. They also depend more on their vision than their smell because their noses aren't snout-shaped like monkeys' noses are. Great Apes consist of gorillas, chimpanzees, oragutans and bonobos, while the Lesser Apes consist of gibbons and siamongs.

Bonus Fact: The amount of identical DNA in chimpanzees and humans range from 94.6% to 99.4%.

Paleontologists Discover Ida

In case you haven’t already heard, a 47-year-old fossil was recently found in Germany. The female primate fossil called Ida is said to be the missing-link species in the evolution of primates. The fossil will hopefully bridge the gap between higher primates, like apes and humans, and less advanced ones, like lemurs, which will eventually give scientists a more precise explanation of how our species evolved. So, be prepared to hear more about this exciting discovery for decades to come!

Gorillas Are Picky Eaters

Did you know that gorillas are fussy eaters? They know what they like, and that's all they will usually eat. With some plants, they may eat only the leaves. With others, only the stalk or the roots. As they eat, they may carefully stack the parts they don't want in a neat pile.

Bonus fact: It is rare for gorillas to drink water in the wild. Most of the time, they get all the moisture that they need from the plants they eat.

Animals in Literature

It's Read Across America week! The NEA (National Education Association) celebrates Dr. Seuss's birthday by encouraging all of us, especially children, to open a book and have a good read. Here at The Jungle Store, we're going to celebrate by remembering some of our favorite children's books and the animal characters that made them so special.

Let's start with a Dr. Seuss classic - Horton Hears a Who.

Horton is an elephant who lives in the Jungle of Nool. The Whos are a race of people living on a dust speck. They ask Horton for his help and protection. Horton is the only one who hears them, and he does defend them, against a buzzard, some apes and a sour kangaroo.

Elephants are social and gregarious creatures. Although their sense of smell is keenest, they communicate with one another by sound. Elephants produce a number of sounds, but perhaps the most interesting is a low-frequency vocalization that lets herds and individual elephants keep in contact with each other. These sounds are loud and can be heard for 5 or 6 miles. But not by the human ear. To humans, the elephants aren't making any sounds at all.

So here's to elephants who listen so well they hear things we don't, perhaps even Whos. And here's to Horton who taught us, "a person's a person. No matter how small."