Golden snub-nosed monkey
Rhinopithecus roxellana
— Where the name comes from
Rhinopithecus is “nose-monkey”, from the Greek rhís, rhinós, and píthēkos, for the snub nose reduced to two upturned nostrils. Roxellana recalls Roxelana, the Ukrainian wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, whom European chronicles said had a turned-up nose: a 19th-century French naturalist found the comparison irresistible. That Roxelana actually had such a nose is documented nowhere.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Primates
- Habitat
- Temperate montane forest, between 1,500 and 3,400 m, with snow for months
- Range
- Central and south-western China: Sichuan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Hubei
- Size
- 52–78 cm of body, 6.5–20 kg
- Diet
- Herbivore — lichens for much of the year, then leaves, bark, shoots
- Lifespan
- 20–25 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It lives at the coldest altitudes of any non-human primate, with winters below freezing.
- 02
It gathers in bands that can pass six hundred animals.
- 03
The nearly absent nose is thought to be an adaptation to frost: less tissue exposed to freezing.
— What sets it apart
It lives on lichens, like a reindeer. In the winter months, when snow covers everything for weeks, the lichens growing on fir bark become almost the only thing to eat, and this monkey survives on them thanks to a gut with bacterial fermentation that lets it digest an extremely poor resource. No other primate in the world depends on lichens, and no other primate spends the winter above three thousand metres in deep snow.
