Baby Lemur's Hideout

After giving birth, a lemur mother will carry it's young around inside it's mouth for a few weeks.

 Picture from Fine Art America

Primarily for safety reasons, the female lemur holds the babies inside it's mouth for protection.  Once the babies are strong enough, they will then bold onto the mother's back and be carried around instead.

Loads of Lemurs in Madagascar

Biologists believe Madagascar is home to more than 50 different kinds of lemurs.

 Picture from PBS

Madagascar’s lemurs range from the itty bitty pygmy mouse lemur, which weighs less than an ounce, to the cat-sized Sifaka, which can weigh up to15 pounds. Smaller species are mostly active at night, while bigger species feed and romp during the day.

Colugos - Flying Lemurs

Commonly referred to as flying lemurs, colugos are gliding mammals found in Southeast Asia. They are not actually true lemurs, and unlike bats cannot truly fly. However, colugos are the most skilled fliers of all gliding mammals, capable of controlled flights of over 300 feet with little loss of altitude. In other words, they could leap from goalpost to goalpost on a football field!

Like flying squirrels, colugos rely on the large membranes of skin that extend between their limbs to provide lift. While this makes these 4lb mammals capable gliders, they are relatively helpless on the ground, cannot stand upright, and do not have strong limbs for walking. Therefore, colugos spend their days resting in trees, only gliding through the forest canopy at night in search of leaves to snack on.

The Fossa - Not a Feline

Native to the island of Madagascar, the fossa somewhat resembles a cougar in appearance. And although this carnivore does have a lot of cat-like qualities, it is actually most closely related to the mongoose family.

Photo: Ran Kirlian

Fossas have a body length of around thirty inches and usually weigh less than 20lbs. They can be found throughout Madagascar’s remaining forest tracts using their excellent hearing and eyesight to hunt lemurs and other small mammals and birds. They are extremely quick and agile animals and are excellent climbers.

Photo: Chad Teer

Fossas are quite solitary animals that mainly live and hunt alone except during the mating season, when hunting parties may be formed. Females give birth to litters of up to six young in underground dens where the baby fossas will stay for the first four months of their lives. Fossas can live for up to twenty years, but like many animals in Madagascar, they are threatened by habitat loss.

Walking Sifakas

The local Malagasy people in Madagascar gave the Sifaka its name because of the unique sound it lets out that sounds like "shif-auk". Sifakas are lemurs. And while they too spend most of their time in trees; they actually remain upright while leaping through the jungle. They jump from tree to tree by using their hind legs like humans do. In fact, they can leap distances of 30 feet. But they can move quickly on the ground too, using a two-legged sideways hop.

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!

Leaping Animals

If you want to talk about grace and beauty in leaping, I don't think anything can beat a lemur. Lemurs are prosimians (primitive primates) and are distantly related to apes and humans. They are not monkeys.

All 88 species of lemurs are found on the small island of Madagascar or the surrounding Comoros islands off the Southeast coast of Africa. They are arboreal, meaning they live in trees and bushes. Lemurs stick to a mostly herbivorous diet and the need to travel from treetop to treetop has made them incredibly skillful at leaping. Lemurs have adapted so well to this form of locomotion that even when grounded they do not walk, but leap along, involving their entire body in a ballet of bounding and balance.

Watch the clip below to see what I mean.