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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...

Cheetah the chimpanzee, who acted in classic Tarzan movies in the early 1930s, died of kidney failure Saturday at Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, a sanctuary spokeswoman said. Cheetah was roughly 80 years old, loved fingerpainting and football and was soothed by nondenominational Christian music, said Debbie Cobb, the sanctuary's outreach director. He was an outgoing chimp who was exposed to the public his whole life, Cobb said today. "He wasn't a chimp that caused a lot of problems," she said. Cheetah acted in the 1932-34 Tarzan movies, Cobb said. Movies filmed during that timeframe starred Johnny Weissmuller and...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A lot of people who have gone to the zoo have become the targets of feces thrown by apes or monkeys, and left no doubt wondering about the so-called intellectual capacity of a beast that would resort to such foul play. Now however, researchers studying such behavior have come to the conclusion that throwing feces, or any object really, is actually a sign of high ordered behavior.

When the DNA sequences of Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes were sequenced, the difference between the sequences of coding genes was smaller than expected based on the phenotypic differences between both species. If not the coding genes, then what is responsible for these dissimilarities? In the words of the authors of a new study that took a look at this question: Although humans and chimpanzees have accumulated significant differences in a number of phenotypic traits since diverging from a common ancestor about six to eight million years ago, their genomes are more than 98.5% identical at protein-coding loci. Since this...

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...

Think of chimpanzees fighting, and it's hard to imagine anything more serious than a few teacups being thrown around at the zoo. But despite their comical popular image, mankind's closest cousins in the animal world are merciless killers with a taste for gang warfare.

Three-year-old Lisa Marie always wears a diaper, never appears in public off a leash and delights in leaping on her owners' heads. "She's part of our family," said Ed Parzygnat, who lives in the Back of the Yards with his wife, Annette, and their chimpanzee. "It's like having a child." Not everyone agrees. A year after a chimpanzee named Travis mauled a Connecticut woman, tearing off her face, there is a push to further regulate private ownership of chimpanzees, monkeys and other primates. The debate pits chimp lovers who keep them as pets or feature them in animal shows against...

Chimpanzees are intelligent enough to appreciate how big a pint of liquid is, or the volume of any other measure. That shows they have an ability to gauge the difference between continuous quantities, such as a pint or half pint of non-alcoholic fruit juice. Previously, apes have only been known to differentiate discrete quantities, such as eight sweets over five. That means chimps are more intelligent than we thought, and shows they have a basic grasp of the physics of liquids. Details of the discovery are published in the journal Animal Cognition.

For the first time, chimpanzees have been seen using tools to chop up and reduce food into smaller bite-sized portions. Chimps in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, use both stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits. The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise unobtainable food, say researchers. Instead, they are actively chopping up the food into more manageable portions. Observations of the behaviour are published in the journal Primates.

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...

As editor of The Post & Email I can now publicly confirm that our website was hacked 3 times yesterday by an Obama supporter, in conjunction with a simultaneous political attack on the Washington Times Newspaper, in Washington, D.C.. The motive for the attack was identical: The advertorial placed by Commander Charles F. Kerchner, Jr., U.S. Navy, Retired in the Washington Times, entitled ” Obama’s Lack of Eligibility.” The advertorial contained a brief explanation why Barack Hussein Obama was still a British citizen, and why that makes him ineligible for the U.S. Presidency. It featured the classic Asian metaphor of...

This is an older video, by a couple years but it is amazing to watch. The experiment pits Japanese researchers vs chimps in a memory experiment.

Chimp dies, others mourn. Interesting picture and story.

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...

We made the brief music video of chimps, polar bears, zebras, elephants and more at the Baltimore Zoo. We recommend the zoo to anyone visiting Baltimore. Watch video.

Some chimps in Gombe National Park have been succumbing to an AIDS-like disease.Michael L. Wilson Researchers have overturned a decade-old consensus that chimpanzees cannot fall ill as a result of infection with a virus similar to HIV.Previously, scientists had thought that chimpanzees were like other non-human primates that can become infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) — which is closely related to HIV — but do not go on to be seriously sickened by the virus.The results suggest that it will not be possible to find the key to HIV immunity in the chimpanzee genome, as scientists had hoped. However,...

JACKO'S chimpanzee pal Bubbles is missing his old friend - and could be the subject of a Hollywood movie and book, his owner claims. The 26-year-old is living at a sanctuary where he was taken in 2003 after becoming too aggressive. He is now healthier in mind and body and new owner Bob Dunn claims a mega-bucks deal is "on the table". Bob said: "There's a lot of interest. Bubbles has led an interesting life. There's lots to say." Jacko rescued Bubbles - his "child" - from a Texas cancer research centre in 1985. They were often seen together in...

Cle Elum's City Council took a few minutes for monkey business. Or, more accurately, chimp business. Tuesday night, the council voted to designate seven chimpanzees at a Cle Elum-area sanctuary as honorary citizens of the central Washington town

COPS are investigating a chimp after it tried to RAPE a female zoo keeper. Terrified Valentina Kirilova had to fight off the sex-crazed primate when he grabbed her as she gave him a banana at Rostov Zoo in Russia. Horrified Valentina said of the attack: “I have spent a lot of time around the primates but I’d never imagined that a lonely chimpanzee could see me as a sex object.” The lusty ape, called Otello, broke the horrified keeper’s wrist as he pulled her into his cage and began to attack her. “When I tried to pass a banana to...

No one can tackle the toughest societal quandaries like a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. They don't monkey around ... or chimp around ... or ape around. (I promise, I am not thinking of a black person here).Ladies and Gentlemen, The Captive Primate Safety Act is on its way to becoming law. (Let your cerebral fanfare bellow out across the fruited plane). And while there was no white smoke coming from the Capitol Building chimney to indicate when it was actually passed, a page was said to be seen tossing bananas from the roof.The House of Representatives was clearly not fooling...

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...

Where on this great earth of ours could King Kong’s descendant survive an attack from an army of zoo workers carrying guns and tranquilizing darts? If you said Skull Island you’re right, but you’re also living in a fantasy world. Those living in the real world know the only logical place would be Japan, and sure enough, that’s where this latest ape-human drama played out. (Ichiro the chimp, a 42-year-old resident of Ishikawa Zoo in Japan, managed to escape to the roof in order to cool down during a heatwave. But it took a lot of work from the zoo...

Compared to their sex-mad, peace-loving Bonobo counterparts, chimpanzees are often seen as a scheming, war-mongering, and selfish species. As both apes are allegedly our closest relatives, together they are often depicted as representing the two extremes of human behaviour. Orlaith Fraser, who will receive her PhD from LJMU's School of Biological Sciences in July 2008, has conducted research that shows chimpanzee behaviour is not as clear cut as previously thought. Her study is the first one to demonstrate the effects of consolation amongst chimpanzees. In her recently published article, Fraser analyses how the apes behave after a fight. Working with...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chimps performed about as well as college students at mental addition, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a finding that suggests non-verbal math skills are not unique to humans. The research from Duke University follows the finding by Japanese researchers earlier this month that young chimpanzees performed better than human adults at a memory game. Prior studies have found non-human primates can match numbers of objects, compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects. "This is the first study that looked at whether or not they could make explicit decisions that were based...

Young chimpanzee can recall number placement better than people can. A particularly cunning seven-year-old chimp named Ayumu has bested university students at a game of memory. He and two other young chimps recalled the placement of numbers flashed onto a computer screen faster and more accurately than humans. “It’s a very simple fact: chimpanzees are better than us — at this task,” says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan who led the study. The work doesn't mean that chimps are 'smarter' than humans, but rather they seem to be better at memorizing a snapshot view of their...

Chimps don't mind being chumps in raisin game 19:53 04 October 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi Unlike humans, chimpanzees will gladly accept a rotten deal from one another, suggesting they have a very different concept of fairness, a new study shows. Experiments reveal that chimps are more focused on the immediate outcome of a transaction than the overall fairness of the deal. By contrast, people generally place a huge emphasis on equity in deal brokering – so much so that it will cause them to make irrational economic decisions. This is demonstrated, for example, in what's known as the...

He's now got a human name — Matthew Hiasl Pan — but he's having trouble getting his day in court. Animal rights activists campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria's Supreme Court after a lower court threw out their latest appeal. A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case earlier this week, ruling that the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories had no legal standing to argue on the chimp's behalf. The association, which worries the shelter caring for the chimp might close, has been...

Female chimpanzees 'sell' sex for fruit By Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 11/09/2007 Female chimpanzees are "selling" sex to the males that gather the most fruit, according to new research. Behavioural psychologists found that female chimps mate with the males that give them the most fruit, while male chimps steal "desirable" fruits such as papaya from farms and orchards in a bid to woo potential mates. Oranges, pineapples and maize are among the most sought after crops, with bananas proving far less popular. The scientists also discovered that the chimp that gathered the most fruit in the...

WASHINGTON - Why did humans evolve to walk upright? Perhaps because it's just plain easier. Make that "energetically less costly," in science-speak, and you have the conclusion of researchers who are proposing a likely reason for our modern gait. Bipedalism — walking on two feet — is one of the defining characteristics of being human, and scientists have debated for years how it came about. In the latest attempt to find an explanation, researchers trained five chimpanzees to walk on a treadmill while wearing masks that allowed measurement of their oxygen consumption.

Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla. Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western scientists. Reaching the region means negotiating the shifting fortunes of warring rebel factions, and the heart of the animals' range...

Once upon a time, Mary-Claire King and the late Allan Wilson published a paper — that became a widely-cited classic — about the genetic similarity of chimps and humans. “Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees,” Science 188 (1975):107-116 was, alas, cited far more for proving the genetic near-identity of chimps and humans than for its much more interesting, deeper and more disturbing message...

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out watching TV. But he doesn't care for coffee, and he isn't actually a person—at least not yet. In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26- year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a "person." Hiasl's supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his...

a population of savannah chimps (Pan troglodytes verus) living in the Fongoli area of south-east Senegal have been seen making spears from strong sticks that they sharpen with their teeth. The average spear length is 63 centimetres (25 inches)... And the method of procuring food with these tools is not simply extractive, as it is when harvesting insects. It is far more aggressive. They use the spears to hunt one of the cutest primates in Africa: bushbabies (Galago senegalensis). Bushbabies are nocturnal and curl up in hollows in trees during the day... Chimps were observed thrusting their spears into hollow...

Chimpanzees have been seen using spears to hunt bushbabies, US researchers say in a study that demonstrates a whole new level of tool use and planning by our closest living relatives. Perhaps even more intriguing, it was only the females who made and used the wooden spears to hunt the tiny nocturnal primates, report Assistant Professor Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani of Iowa State University. Bertolani saw an adolescent female chimp use a spear to stab a bushbaby as it slept in a tree hollow, pull it out and eat it. Pruetz and Bertolani, now at the University of Cambridge,...

NEW YORK While the Iraq Study Group report earned generally positive reviews at newspapers across the country today, Thursday's front page of the New York Post took a far different (but typically outrageous) approach, picturing James Baker and Lee Hamilton, the chairmen of the panel, as "surrender monkeys" -- with their faces pasted on the heads of actual chimps. The front page story by Niles Latham declares, "The Iraq Study Group report delivered to President Bush yesterday contains 79 separate recommendations - but not one that explains how American forces can defeat the terrorist insurgents, only ways to bring the...

Male chimpanzees have a penchant for a toyboy lifestyle and would far rather pair off with an older female than find one of their own age, a study has found.To a young male chimp there is nothing so attractive as wrinkles, sagging skin and bald patches in a female who is old enough to be his great-great-grandmother. Young women in human society can find themselves faced with a queue of men hoping to buy them a drink, but in chimpanzee communities it is the experienced female who is regarded as the epitome of beauty. The toll that age and a...

One of the fastest-evolving pieces of DNA in the human genome is a gene linked to brain development, according to findings by an international team of researchers published in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Nature. In a computer-based search for pieces of DNA that have undergone the most change since the ancestors of humans and chimps diverged, "Human Accelerated Region 1" or HAR1, was a clear standout, said lead author Katie Pollard, assistant professor at the UC Davis Genome Center and the Department of Statistics. "It's evolving incredibly rapidly," Pollard said. "It's really an extreme case." As a...

HIV origin 'found in wild chimps' This mother chimp is SIV positive The origin of HIV has been found in wild chimpanzees living in southern Cameroon, researchers report. A virus called SIVcpz (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus from chimps) was thought to be the source, but had only been found in a few captive animals. Now, an international team of scientists has identified a natural reservoir of SIVcpz in animals living in the wild. The findings are to be published in Science magazine. It is thought that people hunting chimpanzees first contracted the virus - and that cases were first seen in...

Did humans and chimps once interbreed? 17 May 2006 From New ScientistBob Holmes IT GOES to the heart of who we are and where we came from. Our human ancestors were still interbreeding with their chimp cousins long after first splitting from the chimpanzee lineage, a genetic study suggests. Early humans and chimps may even have hybridised completely before diverging a second time. If so, some of the earliest fossils of proto-humans might represent an abortive first attempt to diverge from chimps, rather than being our direct ancestors. We can observe the traces of this complex history in the human...

In an attempt to better define science, evolution and intelligent design, filmmakers are preparing a documentary that reviews lessons delivered last year in U.S. Middle District Court in Harrisburg. Crews from "NOVA," a popular PBS science television series, will be in Dover, York and Harrisburg this summer conducting interviews and obtaining footage for a two-hour show centered on Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District. [Link to text of opinion: Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al.] Barbara Moran, senior researcher for Boston-based "NOVA," said crews paid attention to the trial and interest grew with each...

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Researchers believe that dynamic regions of the human genome -- "hotspots" in terms of duplications and deletions -- are potentially involved in the rapid evolution of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are genetically determined. Now, an international team of researchers, including a graduate student and an associate professor from Arizona State University, are finding similar hotspots in chimpanzees, which has implications for the understanding of genomic evolution in all species. "We found that chimpanzees have many copy number variants -- duplications or deletions of large segments of DNA -- in the same regions of the genome as...

MBIHE-MOKELE, Congo - Even as Congolese villagers devise novel ways to snare the fast-disappearing bonobo, scientists are racing to save the gentle "hippie chimp" from extinction. The bonobo, or pan paniscus, is closely related to man and known for resolving squabbles through sex rather than violence. It's also prized by some Congolese for its tasty meat. The wiry, wizened-faced chimps are being killed in treetop nests in Congo's vast rain forest, their only natural habitat in the world, by villagers who do not seem to know how fast their prey is disappearing. "Bonobos are an icon for peace and love,...

First Chimpanzee Fossils Cause Problems for Evolution by Fazale (Fuz) R. Rana, Ph.D.Where were you on September 1, 2005? Perhaps you missed the announcement of a scientific breakthrough: the influential journal Nature published the completed sequence of the chimpanzee genome.1This remarkable achievement received abundant publicity because it paved the way for biologists to conduct detailed genetic comparisons between humans and chimpanzees.2Unfortunately, the fanfare surrounding the chimpanzee genome overshadowed a more significant discovery. In the same issue, Nature published a report describing the first-ever chimpanzee fossils. This long-awaited scientific advance barely received notice because of the fascination with the chimpanzee genome....

One of biggest paradigm shifts in origins in recent years is when genetics and morphological studies began to show that Neanderthals and humans weren’t related. Sure, a lot of Darwin Fundies around here don’t know that because they get all of their science from the talking point lists of their Fundamentalist Leaders. So this is probably a big shock too, science is also showing that man is not related to any hominids including apes. In the groundbreaking book, Who was Adam?, biochemist Fazale Rana examines the scientific research that is overturning Darwinian Fundamentalism. Here, using peer-reviewed research that the Darwin...

I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees? A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution. His study would build on a paper published in the July...

Panama, Nov 1 (Prensa Latina) A US presidential visit to Panama may be received by angry banana growers in front of that country´s embassy here. George W. Bush will arrive in this capital next Sunday for a less-than-24-hour visit, and although the government has worked hard to present the US statesman´s stopover as a step forward in bilateral relations, rejection prevails. The Cooperative of Multiple Services of Puertos Armuelles (COOSEMUPAR), in the province of Chiriqu¡, has some issues with the US transnational banana company Chiquita Brands International, and has asked the Panamanian government to get back four million dollars worth...

Captive chimpanzees fail to help others in their social group, even when it causes no inconvenience, a behavioural study in Nature journal has found. Helpfulness is prevalent in humans, even when it may harm the helper's own interests to aid another. Humanlike attributes shown by chimps include tool use and maybe rudimentary language skills, but this study suggests altruism is not among them. But other researchers said that captive chimps may be less socially inclined. A team led by Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), set captive chimpanzees tests in which they obtained a food reward....

Oh, No ! More Animals in the News !! London: Researchers from Emory University of Texas, and The University of Louisiana have made a careful study of two separate groups of chimpanzees – in an effort to determine whether the primates have any “altruistic impulses”. Both groups noted ,when chimps are provided with treats, they are not the least bit inclined to share them with other chimps – despite clearly identifiable “begging gestures” by their less fortunate counterparts. ( Oddly enough,the same behavior has been observed in self-described liberals – who tend to contribute far less to the needy than...