Guianan squirrel monkey
Saimiri sciureus
— Where the name comes from
Saimiri comes from the Tupi sai-mirim, “little monkey”, and is one of the many Amazonian names to enter scientific nomenclature directly. Sciureus is the Latin for squirrel, from the Greek skíouros — “shade-tail”, skiá and ourá, because the animal is said to shade itself with its own tail. The monkey’s name therefore contains, at one remove, a tiny piece of Greek poetry.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Primates
- Habitat
- Rainforest, gallery forest, mangroves, the middle storeys of the vegetation
- Range
- The Amazon basin and the Guianas
- Size
- 25–37 cm of body plus a tail longer than the body, 550–1,200 g
- Diet
- Omnivore — insects and fruit in nearly equal parts
- Lifespan
- 15 years in the wild, over 20 in captivity
— Characteristics
- 01
It has the highest ratio of brain mass to body mass of any primate.
- 02
It lives in noisy groups that can pass five hundred animals.
- 03
Its tail is not prehensile: it uses it only as a balance.
— What sets it apart
It has the largest brain of any primate relative to its body — about a twenty-ninth of total weight, against a seventieth in our own species — and this does not make it cleverer than a chimpanzee: it only says that it is very small, and that the brain is an organ that does not shrink in proportion. It is the paradox worth remembering every time that ratio is cited as a measure of intelligence. The absolute record, for that matter, belongs to certain ants.
