Baby Gorilla Born at the San Francisco Zoo

Monifa, a female gorilla at the San Francisco zoo, recently gave birth to a baby boy. 

Here are links to pictures and a video of the cute baby.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gorillas: Skating on Thin Ice

As we had indicated earlier in this blog, 2009 is the Year of the Gorilla. On January 15, humans dressed in gorilla costumes performed a dance on ice at the Natural History Museum of London.  This was part of the UNEP launch of the Year of the Gorilla. This year will be marked by a number of initiatives to educate and raise awareness on the plight of one of our closest relatives.  More research will also be done in Cameroon and Nigeria to improve community-based conservation efforts aimed at protecting the Cross River Gorilla. Check out this UNEP link to read more about the Projects to Save Africa's Rarest Ape and see pictures of the skating gorillas .
Read more

November Primate Scoops

Read in the National Geographic News - On November 14, the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) in Goma successfully rescued Mapita, a baby chimpanzee, from Congolese army soldiers who were mistreating her. For more information on the story, go the Virunga National Park blog at: http://gorilla.cd/category/chimpanzees/ ----------- Most touching - Chimpanzee Takes Care of White Tiger Cubs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuzUigpHjMU http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/bizarre&id=6501487 http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/strange/news-article.aspx?storyid=123437&catid=82 ----------- Read in Wired Science - How Biology and Technology Shape Sex and War - see link below.  http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/qa-how-biology.html ----------- Jane Goodall's visit to Taiwan on November 24.  This article found in Taiwan News.   http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=796235&lang=eng_news
Read more

Tree-climbing or Knuckle walking? That is the Question.

Up until this week, the assumption was that homo sapiens evolved from a knuckle-walking primate ancestor.  It seemed logical enough.  Two of our wrist bones fused, thereby making it easier for our ancestors' gate to be more stable while knuckle-walking.  But this week, the shattering news reached those of us interested in primates.   Knuckle-walking?  Not so!  According to a new study published by Tracy Kivell and Daniel Schmidt, Independent evolution of knuckle-walking in African apes shows that humans did not evolve from a knuckle-walking ancestors.   Homo sapiens, they say, descend from a tree-climbing ancestor who then came down and evolved to bipedalism. As a matter of fact, the authors argue the data they collected would indicate knuckle-walking evolved twice - thereby placing chimpanzees and bonobos in a different knuckle-walking category than gorillas.  They found that the wrist bone structure of gorillas is very different from that of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest r...
Read more