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* An adult male named Rakus chewed a plant used by people in Southeast Asia to treat pain and inflammation, then applied it to an injury on his right cheek * Photographs show the animal’s wound closed within a month without any problems ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Rakus, a Sumatran orangutan, is seen two months after he started treating himself with a medicinal plant at a protected rainforest area in Indonesia. Photo:Safruddin/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour via Reuters AsiaSoutheast Asia Wild orangutan seen using medicinal plant to treat wound, scientists say An adult male named Rakus chewed a plant used by people...

In order to analyze the tooth enamel, the researchers embedded the teeth in resin and then cut them into wafer-thin slices some 150 micrometers thick. These extremely precious tooth samples are part of the Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald Collection at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, a permanent loan from the Werner Reimers Foundation.In turn, they used a special laser to ablate material from the thin slices, which was chemically analyzed with a mass spectrometer for, among other elements, strontium and calcium, which are found in both bones and teeth (Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass...

Video here => https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ze-nVh2Bs

The natural world never fails to surprise us, and this moving encounter between an orangutan and a man in Borneo has melted hearts all over the world. Amateur photographer Anil Prabhakar captured the fleeting moment, in which one of the Indonesian island's critically endangered apes stretched out its hand to help a man out of snake-infested water.

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Tree-dwelling apes in Europe strode upright around 5 million years before members of the human evolutionary family hit the ground walking in Africa. That’s the implication of fossils from a previously unknown ape that lived in what’s now Germany about 11.6 million years ago, say paleontologist Madelaine Böhme of the University of Tübingen in Germany and her colleagues. But the relation, if any, of these finds to the evolution of a two-legged stride in hominids by perhaps 6 million years ago is hazy (SN: 9/11/04). Excavations in a section of a Bavarian clay pit produced 37 fossils from the ancient...

An orangutan named Sandra, at the center of a landmark ruling in Argentina that said she is a "non-human person" entitled to some of the same rights as humans, is making her way to a Florida sanctuary where great apes enjoy those privileges without benefit of a court order. Once Sandra is there, the 33-year-old orangutan will have the company of others in her species for the first time in many years. Sandra left her solitary world at a zoo in Buenos Aires in late September and is currently in Kansas, where she'll remain in quarantine until she's cleared to...

A candidate’s policy, Bernhardt at Interior and astrophysicists on your ranch Presidential candidate U.S. Senator and candidate for president Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), sometimes referred to as Pocahontas because of a false claim of Native American heritage, has released her proposed federal lands policy. This is interesting to observe as it gives us a peek at the wish list of progressives and their environmentalist kin. Warren tells us “it is wrong to prioritize corporate profits over the health and safety of our local communities.” Therefore, she says, “on my first day as president, I will sign an executive order that...

Researchers from James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, chose the bat poo in their quest to answer to a long-standing question: why is there some much biodiversity on the islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java, when not so long ago (geologically speaking) they were all part of one vast continent? One theory has been that the former continent (Sundaland) was dissected by a savanna corridor. "That might explain why Sumatra and Borneo each have their own species of orang-utan, even though they were linked by land for millions of years," Dr Chris Wurster said. "The corridor would have divided the...

One Russian man was arrested at a Bali airport for attempting to smuggle a drugged baby orangutan in his luggage out of the air hub and back to his home country. The tourist now faces up to $7,000 in fines and five years in prison. On Friday night, Andrei Zhestkov was detained at Ngurah Rai International Airport before boarding a flight back to Russia, The Independent reports. Officials found the 2-year-old orangutan fast asleep in a basket, evidently drugged with allergy pills, after a routine security screening. Zhestkov, 27, reportedly told officials that he had been given the protected primate...

JAKARTA: The world's only known albino orangutan has been released back into the jungle more than a year after she was found emaciated and bloody in a remote corner of Borneo, an Indonesian NGO said on Friday (Dec 21). Environmentalists rescued "Alba" from a cage where she was being kept as a pet by villagers in Central Kalimantan in April last year. She was found with dry blood smeared around her nose - the result of her violent capture - and weighed just 8 kilogrammes, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOSF) said. The blue-eyed primate, covered in fuzzy white hair,...

Orangutans are among the most intelligent primates. They have human-like long-term memory, routinely use a variety of sophisticated tools in the wild and construct elaborate sleeping nests each night from foliage and branches. ..." “The hook-bending task has become a benchmark paradigm to test tool innovation abilities in comparative psychology,” said co-author Dr. Alice Auersperg, a scientist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.“Considering the speed of their hook innovation, it seems that orangutans actively invented a solution to this problem rather than applying routined behaviors.”“In the study, we confronted Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) with a vertical tube containing...

A video of an Orangutan smoking a cigarette at an Indonesian Zoo is drawing a lot of criticism. A man flicked his cigarette into the primates enclosure at which point the orangutan picked it up and began smoking it. The act drew some laughter from the crowd at the time, but now activists are saying the video is just further evidence of the Bandung Zoo’s lack of supervision. The zoo has previously been accused of starving its animals and was temporarily closed in 2016 after an elephant was found dead with bruises on its body.

All great mind reading begins with chocolate. That’s the basis for a classic experiment that tests whether children have something called theory of mind—the ability to attribute desires, intentions, and knowledge to others. When they see someone hide a chocolate bar in a box, then leave the room while a second person sneaks in and hides it elsewhere, they have to guess where the first person will look for the bar. If they guess “in the original box,” they pass the test, and show they understand what’s going on in the first person’s mind—even when it doesn’t match reality. For...

Study: Apes Could Make Competent Bartenders An ape in Sweden has demonstrated human-level flavour prediction abilities by memorising cocktail ingredients, according to a recent study. By providing a captive orangutan with its own personal cocktail bar, a group of researchers found that large primates exhibit a type of taste memory thought to be unique to humans. In a new study published in the Animal Cognition journal, researchers at Lund University in Sweden offered Naong, a male orangutan at a Swedish Zoo, three distinct tasting juices – cherry, rhubarb and lemon – as well as cider apple vinegar. Each in a...

BORENO — An animal charity that rescues orangutans in Borneo has released heartbreaking footage of a baby orangutan that was dumped in a filthy cardboard box and left out in a backyard in the sun to die.The baby, who has been named Gito by the team from International Animal Rescue (IAR) who saved him, was so lifeless when they reached him that at first they thought he was dead. He was lying corpse-like with his arms folded across his chest and this, along with a lack of hair and grey flaking skin, made him look almost mummified in his cardboard...

The 30-second film captures the orangutan monkeying around with the cubs before sitting one on her knee and feeding it with a bottle of milk

Hard Rock Removes Ad After Accusations That a Guitar-Playing Orangutan Is Offensive Inset: Hard Rock's offending ad by KATHERINE TIMPF April 21, 2015 Ad was intended to promote new location in Malaysia. Hard Rock Cafe has ended a promotional campaign featuring a Photoshopped picture of an orangutan playing a guitar after facing accusations that the picture was outrageously offensive because the orangutan was playing a guitar. The ad was intended to promote the chain’s new location in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the state of Sabah in Malaysia and home to a famous wildlife refuge for the endangered animal. Seeing...

Personhood-winked: “Animal rights” are anti-human by Daniel Clark When is a person not a human? Why, when it’s a “non-human person,” of course. If that’s the unfunniest riddle you’ve ever heard, there’s good reason, because its answer has potentially deadly consequences. In Argentina, an appellate court has bestowed legal personhood on an orangutan named Sandra. Meanwhile, here in the States, proposed “personhood laws” that would recognize every human being as a person are regarded as controversial. These two stories are undoubtedly related, as the terminology of the anti-human animal rights movement makes clear. The Argentine court declared Sandra to be...

An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognized the ape as a "non-human person" unlawfully deprived of its freedom, local media reported on Sunday. Animal rights campaigners filed a habeas corpus petition - a document more typically used to challenge the legality of a person's detention or imprisonment - in November on behalf of Sandra, a 29-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Buenos Aires zoo. In a landmark ruling that could pave the way for more lawsuits, the Association of Officials and Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA) argued the ape...