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Deceptive Chimp Hides Ammo, Blasts Unsuspecting Zoo Visitors - (Santino just 1 second before the throw.) A chimp that creates hiding places for rocks he throws at zoo visitors reveals for the first time that humanity's closest living relatives can plan to deceive, researchers say. These findings could shed light on the evolution of higher mental functions such as planning, investigators added. The chimpanzee known as Santino is the dominant male of his group at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. Intriguingly, past research showed the ape calmly gathered stones from his enclosure's moat and pieces of concrete he pulled off an...

Eagerly he collects wood from the ground, snaps the branches into small pieces and carefully balances them in a pile. Then, taking care not to burn himself, he gently strikes a match and gets ready for a fry-up. Like all red-blooded males, Kanzi loves messing around with a barbecue. But then, as these extraordinary pictures show, Kanzi is no man. He is a bonobo - pygmy chimpanzee - and his love of fire is challenging the way that we think about our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. For although bonobo apes and larger chimpanzees use twigs and leaves as...

THIS is the moment a group of chimpanzees sees daylight for the first time in 30 years — after being locked in cages for medical testing. The animals hugged each other in delight before they took their first steps outside. Emotional footage, below, shows how they reacted to their new surroundings. The outing marked the end of a 14-year bid to re-integrate the 38 primates after they spent most of their lives cooped up inside. One commentator said: "They hugged as if saying, 'We're finally free'. And then they laughed." The chimpanzees were taken from their mothers shortly after their...

Maturen, 22, had been a volunteer at the sanctuary for more than three years. She recalls the events of Feb. 12 [2010] in great detail. [snip -- she relates the horror in detail next] No one from the sanctuary called 911...Just before 11:30 a.m., someone else did call. A man told the dispatcher..."Something's happening over there," he said. "I don't know if one of those apes got loose, but we had to run out of there real fast, and there were women screaming over there." Deputy Gregory Mason arrived at 11:37 a.m. and found the gates locked.... [snip -- she...

The bear that recently killed a caretaker in a Cleveland suburb was the latest example of animal violence in a state that has some of the nation's weakest restrictions on exotic pets and among the highest number of injuries and deaths caused by them. The death in Ohio and attacks elsewhere - including the maiming of a Connecticut woman by her friend's pet chimpanzee and a 2-year-old Florida girl squeezed to death by her family's python - highlight that the patchwork of federal, state and local laws on keeping dangerous wild animals at home has holes. After a friend's 200-pound...

A recent high-profile article in the journal Nature released the results of a study with implications that shocked the scientific community because they contradict long-held claims of human-chimp DNA similarity.1 A previous Acts & Facts article showed that much of the research surrounding the often touted claims of 98 percent (or higher) DNA similarity between chimps and humans has been based on flawed and biased research.2 The problem is that the similarity has been uncertain because no one has performed an unbiased and comprehensive DNA similarity study until now. And the results are not good news for the story of...

Tennessee Hospitality Association CEO Walt Baker has sent out an e-mail mockingly comparing Michelle Obama to Tarzan's chimpanzee sidekick, Cheeta. In an e-mail forwarded by Walt Baker to 12 prominent Nashvillians on Thursday, in what he originally called political humor, there was an unflattering picture of Michelle Obama, whose face was in a certain expression, right beneath a chimpanzee which seemed to be making the exact same facial expression. Additionally, Michelle Obama was the butt of the joke in the same e-mail in a comparison to chimpanzee Cheeta, after it was said that she went on to marry a lawyer...

Chimps remain cool under fire, possessing a near human ability to predict how wildfires spread and react accordingly. This newfound capability of chimpanzees to understand flames might shed light on when and how our distant ancestors first learned to control fire, scientists now suggest. Primatologist Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames was observing savanna chimpanzees in Senegal in 2006 as people were setting wildfires, an annual tradition that clears land and aids hunting. Most areas within the chimpanzees' home range are burned to some degree. "It was the end of the dry season, so the fires burn so...

A new concept making its way through the scientific community holds that just a few key changes in the right genes will result in a whole new life form as different from its progenitor as a bird is from a lizard![1] This idea is being applied to a number of key problems in the evolutionary model, one of which is the lack of transitional forms in both the fossil record and the living (extant) record. The new concept supposedly adds support to the "punctuated equilibrium" model proposed by the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. Dr. Gould derived his ideas...

A Connecticut woman who was attacked by a 200-pound chimpanzee revealed her horribly disfigured face to a national TV audience today after talk queen Oprah Winfrey lifted the veil off her face. Charla Nash, 56, told Oprah she usually walks around the Cleveland Clinic with her hat and veil so she doesn’t frighten any hospital visitors.

Is This Haunting Picture Proof That Chimps Really DO Grieve? MICHAEL HANLON 27th October 2009 [Pic in URL] United in what appears to be deep and profound grief, a phalanx of more than a dozen chimpanzees stood in silence watching from behind the wire of their enclosure as the body of one of their own was wheeled past. This extraordinary scene took place recently at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon, West Africa. When a chimp called Dorothy, who was in her late 40s, died of heart failure, her fellow apes seemed to be stricken by sorrow. Enlarge Chimpanzees...

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked Friday 26 June 2009Restating the case for human uniquenessA brilliant new book cuts through all the media-oriented research about ‘clever chimps’ using tools, doing maths and feeling emotions, and reminds us that, in truth, there is nothing remotely human about primates.Helene Guldberg Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human is a refreshing defence of human uniqueness. ‘We are a truly exceptional primate with minds that are genuinely discontinuous to other animals’, Jeremy Taylor writes. The first half of Not a Chimp challenges ‘the basis...

Berlin doctors have refused to give a prognosis on whether Berlin zoo director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz’ index finger had been successfully reattached after a chimpanzee bit it off on Monday. “There is a chance for the very destroyed finger, but it is not big,” head surgeon at Berlin's Marzahn district hospital Andreas Eisenschenk said on Tuesday, adding that though the bite wound is flush, there is a high risk of infection. “With chimpanzees there are some germs in play that we can’t control,” he said. As 55-year-old Blaszkiewitz was giving a tour through the zoo on Monday, he stopped at Pedro...

STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) - A Connecticut prosecutor says test results show a chimpanzee that mauled a woman had the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in its system. Stamford State's Attorney David Cohen said Wednesday that it's unclear if the drug played a role in the attack. The 200-pound chimp, named Travis, attacked Stamford resident Charla Nash on Feb. 16. Nash lost her hands, nose, lips and eyelids in the attack. Doctors at Ohio's Cleveland Clinic say she is blind and faces two years of surgical procedures.

For chimps, candy is dandy but steak is quicker Tue Apr 7, 2009 8:06pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Human females may get offended at dates who expect a little something extra after they buy a steak dinner, but for chimpanzees, the exchange may be a fair one, German researchers reported on Tuesday. They found that female chimpanzees mate more frequently with males who often share meat with them. "Our results strongly suggest that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for sex, and do so on a long-term basis," Cristina Gomes of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany said...

Chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers. Male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.

Making sure your offspring know how to clean their teeth appears to be as important to monkeys as to humans. Female monkeys in Thailand have been observed showing their young how to floss their teeth - using human hair. Researchers from Japan said they watched seven long-tailed macaques cleaning the spaces between their teeth in the same manner as humans. They spent double the amount of time flossing when they were being watched by their infants, the team said. This suggests the mothers were deliberately teaching their young how to floss, Professor Nobuo Masataka of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute...

A male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors, according to researchers. Keepers at Furuvik Zoo found that the chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles. Further, the chimp learned to recognise how and when parts of his concrete enclosure could be pulled apart to fashion further projectiles. The findings are reported in the journal Current Biology. There has been scant evidence in previous research that animals can plan for future events.

This whole controversy over the tragic incident involving Travis the chimpanzee has restored my faith in my fellow Americans. My faith that they're really dumb, I mean. Democrat or Republican, rural or urban, Americans are ignorant of the most basic facts of their own existence.

The NAACP has called for a boycott of the New York Post. In other words, they’ve endorsed censorship. In a truly bizarre distortion of reality, the organization called the Post’s infamous chimpanzee cartoon “an invitation to assassinate” President Obama. Benjamin Todd Jealous, the aptly-named president of the NAACP, called for...

A third apology may not be enough. Chimpgate continues, though Rupert Murdoch himself has offered a mea culpa..

Forget the stimulus -- this one moved really fast. From the Humane Society: U.S. House of Representatives Passes Captive Primate Safety Act WASHINGTON (Feb. 24, 2009) — Eight days after a chimpanzee kept as a pet attacked and critically injured a Connecticut woman, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, H.R. 80, introduced by U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., to stop interstate commerce in primates as pets. The bill passed by a vote of 323 to 95. The bill now moves for consideration to the U.S. Senate, where the effort to pass...

It's not over yet. Public interpretation of gunned down chimp cartoon goes into phase 2, Rev. Sharpton included.

STAMFORD, Connecticut — Doctors say a Connecticut woman mauled by a 200-pound chimpanzee is making slight progress after more than seven hours of surgery by four teams of surgeons. Dr. Kevin Miller of Stamford Hospital says 55-year-old Charla Nash suffered extensive facial and hand injuries when she was attacked Monday. He says stabilizing her condition took more than seven hours of surgery.

(Must see images of Google News search)(IHateTheMedia.com Exclusive) We’re professional cynics at IHateTheMedia.com. We’re trained to expect the worst from the media. With that in mind, it seemed to us that the media had paid far more attention to the trivial story of Connecticut’s murderous monkey than the lightning rod story of Buffalo’s beheaded Muslim wife. Is it possible, we wondered, that the media would intentionally ignore the kind of shocking crime story they normally love, simply because focusing on a murderous Muslim is politically incorrect in the land of liberal news? So we performed a simple experiment. We searched...

A bill pending in Congress that would ban selling primates as pets must be passed to rectify a patchwork of state and local laws that leave many people at risk of being attacked by exotic animals like chimpanzees, animal experts and lawmakers told FOXNews.com. Police shot and killed a 200-pound chimpanzee in Connecticut Monday after it attacked a 55-year-old woman, leaving her in critical condition with major, "life-altering" injuries to her face and hands.

Could Cheeta the chimp, the famous performing primate who's said to have starred alongside Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films and Rex Harrison in Dr. Doolittle, be an impostor?It's a story whose plot resembles a 1930s screwball comedy, but author R.D. Rosen says it's true: Cheeta the chimp, said to be the oldest nonhuman primate in the world at 76, is not who he claims to be. (Or rather, he's not who his deceased trainer, Tony Gentry, claimed he was.) In 2007, Rosen set out to write a book about Cheeta: his abduction from the wilds of his native Liberia;...

Riddle me this: the New York Post, a famously combative, conservative newspaper owned by Fox News proprietor Rupert Murdoch, runs a cartoon implying that a crazed chimpanzee wrote the recent economic stimulus bill, which was actually championed and developed by our nation's first black president.Longtime civil rights activist Al Sharpton thinks it might be. New York Gov. David Paterson, who is that state's first black chief executive, has said "an explanation is in order."

Here is the chilling 911 audio of the call made by a woman whose chimpanzee attacked her friend and brutally disfigured her. The woman is in critical condition. The tape has the hysterical owner asking for help in shooting her chimp to keep him from attacking her too. The owner said she had tried stabbing the chimp but that it had only made it worse. The attack occurred in Connecticut. Absolutely horrific. . . . . (Listen to 911 Tape)

A pet chimpanzee - who had appeared in TV commercials and shows - got loose at a home at 241 Rock Rimmon Road in Stamford, Connecticut Monday afternoon, according to Stamford police. And it was not his first time. His owner, Sandra Herold, 70, had called a friend over to help since "Travis" was misbehaving. He had taken the keys to the car. The chimp was also trying to open car doors, which he apparently did to indicate he wanted to go for a ride. Herold was able to coax Travis back to the house and she gave him some...

Escaped chimpanzee Travis is coaxed into a waiting sport utility vehicle in downtown Stamford, Conn. in 2003. A tame chimp was shot and killed by Stamford cops Monday after the ape badly mauled a friend of its owner. Witnesses said Travis, a normally docile 200-pound chimp, attacked a woman, forcing his owner to go after him with a butcher's knife.When cops drove up, the chimp tore off the cruiser's side mirror and tried to open the door.Police then shot and killed him, WABC-TV reported. The victim was said to be in critical condition. Travis, a 16-year-old who liked to drink...

STAMFORD -- A woman whose 175-pound chimpanzee attacked her friend Monday afternoon tried to stop the attack by stabbing the primate with a butcher knife, police said. As police arrived to clear the way for emergency medical workers to treat the gravely injured friend, the chimp, Travis, revived and opened the door of the police cruiser. The officer inside fired several shots, killing the chimp. Travis' owner, Sandra Herold, and two officers also were hurt, though the extent of their injuries is unknown, police said. Travis was known around Stamford for years because he rode around in trucks belonging to...

According to Darwinian theory, in the past we had a common ancestor with baboons, further back with bananas and still further with bacteria. This dogma has spread like a ‘meme’, which is a contagious idea that propagates in a similar way as a virus by infecting brains, according to inventor of the word, Richard Dawkins.1 In 2002, Roy Britten dispelled the first monkey meme that human and chimpanzee DNA sequences are 98.5% identical.2 He showed that when indelmutations were also taken into account, the difference suddenly became about 5%. The fact that chimpanzee genomes are about 10% larger than that...

Genetic Expression: Same Genes Can Produce Different Results by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Genes could be thought of as brick molds, used to construct materials for building the physical structures of living organisms. They carry the codes to help make proteins, which then make up different cells that are combined together to form mega-structures called tissues. New research has shed more light on how genes are used by cells to build the different tissues needed by complex living creatures. Genes—which make up a very small fraction of DNA—were thought to be the central genetic features that drive cell function and embryonic...

A type of chimpanzee known to use sex for greetings, reconciliations, and favors may not be all about peace, love, and understanding after all. A new study reveals that some bonobos—one of humankind's closest genetic relatives—hunt and eat other primates. Groups of the endangered chimpanzee subspecies were observed stalking, chasing, and killing monkeys they later consumed. Scientists have long known from stool samples that some bonobos eat rodents and small antelopes in their natural forest habitats in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but many researchers thought this was the extent of their hunting activities. Gottfried Hohmann and Martin Surbeck,...

How did the chimpanzee cross the road? 14 September 2006 From New Scientist Print Edition. Cautiously, it would seem. When it comes to crossing roads, chimps seem to have formulated their own version of a highway code. What's more, the time they spend pondering a strategy before crossing depends on how dangerous the road is. When some monkeys and baboons cross risky terrain, adult males travel at the front of the group to reduce the risk of it being attacked by predators. This had never been recorded in great apes, but now Kimberly Hockings of the University of Stirling in...

PARIS - A tribe of apes living in remote forests in the northern Democratic Republic of Congo are unusually large chimpanzees, not a new species of giant ape or a chimp-gorilla hybrid, New Scientist says. Zoologists became excited after people living around Bili, a town about 200 kilometres (120 miles) east of the Ebola River, recounted tales of seeing hugeferocious apes with a taste for killing lions. From photographs, the creatures were estimated to weigh about 100 kilos (220 pounds) and their footprints, at up to 34 centimetres (13.6 inches), were longer than a gorilla’s. But a year-long hunt by...

Is this commercial for REAL??? It is HILARIOUS but I never saw it on TV. Check out the video HERE.

Background Cancer is a major medical problem in modern societies. However, the incidence of this disease in non-human primates is very low. To study whether genetic differences between human and chimpanzee could contribute to their distinct cancer susceptibility, we have examined in the chimpanzee genome the orthologous genes of a set of 333 human cancer genes. Results This analysis has revealed that all examined human cancer genes are present in chimpanzee, contain intact open reading frames and show a high degree of conservation between both species. However, detailed analysis of this set of genes has shown some differences in genes...

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 26 - In hiring Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, to remake the monster classic "King Kong," Universal Pictures took a daring leap, paying him $20 million to direct, produce and be the co-writer of the film. With seven weeks to go before the movie's release, the risks are becoming clearer. After seeing a version of the film in late September at Mr. Jackson's studio in New Zealand, Universal executives agreed to release "King Kong" at a length of three hours. The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and...

LONDON - Monkey business proved to be a lucrative pastime Monday when paintings by Congo the chimpanzee sold at auction for more than 14,000 pounds (US$25,620; euro20,917). The collection of three tempera paintings — all abstract — were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol. But while Warhol and Renoir's work didn't sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo's paintings. An American bidder named Howard Hong, who described himself as an "enthusiast of modern and contemporary painting," purchased the lot of paintings for 14,400 pounds (US$26,352; euro21,515) including buyer's premium. The...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African zoo is trying to persuade its star chimpanzee to kick a bad smoking habit. Charlie, a grown male chimp and the Bloemfontein Zoo, has been picking up cigarettes thrown to him by visitors and smoking them -- a habit he probably picked up by observing humans, zoo officials told the SAPA news agency on Thursday. "Baby chimps pick up habits by mimicking adults and we think he started mimicking smokers at his enclosure which probably led to smokers throwing him cigarettes," spokesman Daryl Barnes told SAPA. Barnes said Charlie was already showing the signs...

A man who was severely mauled by two chimpanzees at an animal sanctuary last week was quickly overwhelmed when the apes attacked, his wife said Monday. "One was at his head, one was at his foot. But all that time ... he was trying to reason with them," a sobbing LaDonna Davis told ABC's "Good Morning America." "I couldn't do anything." Davis, 64, and her husband, St. James Davis, were visiting Animal Haven Ranch near Bakersfield on Thursday when two male chimps escaped their enclosure and attacked the couple. "When we made eye contact, the charge was on," LaDonna Davis...

HAVILAH, Calif. — St. James and LaDonna Davis raised Moe the chimpanzee as their son. That was the word they used to describe him, and that was how they treated him — like a hairy, rambunctious child who was a pampered member of the family. They taught him to wear clothes, to take showers, to use the toilet and to watch TV in their West Covina home. They had their picture taken in bed with him. On Thursday, the day they marked as Moe's 39th birthday, their love for the chimp nearly cost them their lives. The Davises were visiting...

Chimps Shot Dead After Attacking Visitors At California Sanctuary POSTED: 8:08 am EST March 4, 2005 BAKERSFIELD, Calif. -- A couple's plans for a birthday party for their former pet chimpanzee turned tragic when two other chimps at an animal sanctuary escaped from their cage and attacked. The man was critically injured with massive wounds to his face, body and limbs, and the attacking animals were shot dead. St. James and LaDonna Davis were at the Animal Haven Ranch in Caliente to celebrate the birthday of Moe, a 39-year-old chimpanzee who was taken from their suburban Los Angeles home in...

 May 27, 2004 Chimps are not like humans Whole-chromosome comparison reveals much greater genetic differences than expected | By Cathy Holding The vigorous debate on how different chimpanzees are from humans is fuelled by new data in this week's Nature, as the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium reports that 83% of chimpanzee chromosome 22 proteins are different from their human counterparts.The difference is "much more complicated that we initially imagined or speculated," Yoshiyuki Sakaki, who headed the consortium, told The Scientist. "Our group completed the human chromosome 21 sequence about 3 years ago," Sakaki, director of the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center,...

The Day After Tomorrow Part 2.........

Up for comparison: Chimp DNA posted alongside human's Los Angeles Times Scientists have completed a draft of the chimpanzee genetic blueprint and placed the information into a free, public database, scientists announced Wednesday. The draft, covering an estimated 88 percent to 90 percent of the genome's gene-coding regions, has been carefully aligned with the human genome on the Web site, allowing a direct comparison of the two. "We want to let the scientific community know that the sequence is available and they can have access to it," said Richard K. Wilson, director of the genome sequencing center at Washington University...

    Great apes' African stronghold under grave threat   12:21 07 April 03   NewScientist.com news service   The bush meat trade and the Ebola virus are devastating great ape populations in west Africa - their last major refugeThe first major survey for 20 years shows commercial hunters are decimating gorilla and chimpanzee populations near urban centres and logging camps, while Ebola is wiping out large gorilla groups living in remote forests.   Bessie, a western gorilla, suckles her infant at Mbeli clearing in northern Congo (Image: Richard Parnell) The combination could push our closest animal relatives to the brink of...

US activists demand lawyers for chimps Our nearest relative: Should apes get lawyers too? Animal activists in the United States have launched a new campaign to let chimpanzees go to court. The Chimpanzee Collaboratory says chimpanzees are so close to humans - sharing 98.7% of our genetic make-up - that they deserve to get the same kind of legal representation as children. A minimum level of autonomy is sufficient to justify the basic legal right to bodily integrity Lawyer Steven Wise Campaigners say this would let activists act as legal guardians for the chimps, potentially lodging law suits against researchers...