|
Michael (gorilla)
Michael (March 17, 1973, Cameroon – April 19, 2000) was the first male 'talking' gorilla. He had a working vocabulary of over 600 signs in American Sign Language, taught to him by Koko, a female gorilla; Dr. Francine Patterson (to whom the gorillas referred using the sign "''penny''"); and other staff of Stanford University. Michael, an orphan, spent most of his life in Woodside, California, where he became a local celebrity and painter, creating vividly colourful abstract works. Biography Michael's parents were killed while he was still a baby. According to the movie ''Koko: Conversation with a Gorilla'', his handlers felt that using sign language, he was attempting to relate his mother's death at the hands of poachers. At the age of three, he was brought to live with Koko at Stanford. Michael's favorite color was yellow, and his favorite television shows were ''Sesame Street'' and ''Mister Rogers''. He enjoyed listening to Luciano Pavarotti and looking at pictures. Mic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gorilla
Gorillas are herbivorous, predominantly ground-dwelling great apes that inhabit the tropical forests of equatorial Africa. The genus ''Gorilla'' is divided into two species: the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla, and either four or five subspecies. The DNA of gorillas is highly similar to that of humans, from 95 to 99% depending on what is included, and they are the next closest living relatives to humans after chimpanzees and bonobos. Gorillas are the largest living primates, reaching heights between 1.25 and 1.8 metres, weights between 100 and 270 kg, and arm spans up to 2.6 metres, depending on species and sex. They tend to live in troops, with the leader being called a silverback. The Eastern gorilla is distinguished from the Western by darker fur colour and some other minor morphological differences. Gorillas tend to live 35–40 years in the wild. The oldest gorilla known is Fatou (b. 1957), who is still alive at the advanced age of 65 years. Gorillas' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Gorilla Foundation
The Gorilla Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in 1976 by Francine Patterson and Ronald Cohn in order to purchase the young gorilla named Koko from the San Francisco Zoo. Patterson had been teaching Koko American Sign Language since 1972, under custody of the zoo. In 1974, Patterson moved the project from a trailer at the zoo to a new compound at Stanford University, yet there was a possibility that Koko would need to be returned to the zoo, so Patterson raised money to buy and keep her. After the purchase, the foundation continued to support Patterson's research as she worked with Koko, in order to research language acquisition by non-human animals. Besides Koko, the foundation also kept two male gorillas: Michael from 1976 until his death in 2000, and Ndume from 1991 until his return to the Cincinnati Zoo in 2019. Koko died in 2018, and after her death followed by the transfer of Ndume, the foundation no longer had any gorillas on which to conduct research. Beginning ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Mind Of An Ape
''The Mind of an Ape'' is a 1983 book by David Premack and his wife Ann James Premack. The authors argue that it is possible to teach language to (non-human) great apes. They write: "We now know that someone who comprehends speech must know language, even if he or she cannot produce it."Premack, David & Premack, Ann James. ''The Mind of an Ape'', p. 13. . The authors David Premack, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Ann James Premack, a science writer, began teaching language to apes in 1964. Premack started his work at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida, a program at the University of Florida, continued it at the University of Missouri, then at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania. The apes The subjects of the program, nine chimpanzees, were reared in a laboratory environment specifically designed to stimulate their intellect, as animals raised otherwise fail to thrive. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sign Language
Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Linguists consider both spoken and signed communication to be types of natural language, meaning that both emerged through an abstract, protracted aging process and evolved over time without meticulous planning. Sign language should not be confused with body language, a type of nonverbal communication. Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages have developed as useful means of communication and form the core of local Deaf cultures. Although signing is used primarily by the deaf and hard of hearing, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Primate
Primates are a diverse order of mammals. They are divided into the strepsirrhines, which include the lemurs, galagos, and lorisids, and the haplorhines, which include the tarsiers and the simians (monkeys and apes, the latter including humans). Primates arose 85–55 million years ago first from small terrestrial mammals, which adapted to living in the trees of tropical forests: many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging environment, including large brains, visual acuity, color vision, a shoulder girdle allowing a large degree of movement in the shoulder joint, and dextrous hands. Primates range in size from Madame Berthe's mouse lemur, which weighs , to the eastern gorilla, weighing over . There are 376–524 species of living primates, depending on which classification is used. New primate species continue to be discovered: over 25 species were described in the 2000s, 36 in the 2010s, and three in the 2020s. Primates have large bra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mountain Gorilla
The mountain gorilla (''Gorilla beringei beringei'') is one of the two subspecies of the eastern gorilla. It is listed as endangered by the IUCN as of 2018. There are two populations: One is found in the Virunga volcanic mountains of Central/ East Africa, within three National Parks: Mgahinga, in southwest Uganda; Volcanoes, in northwest Rwanda; and Virunga, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The other population is found in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Some primatologists speculate the Bwindi population is a separate subspecies, though no description has been finalized. As of June 2018, there were more than 1,000 individuals. Evolution, taxonomy, and classification Mountain gorillas are descendants of ancestral monkeys and apes found in Africa and Arabia during the start of the Oligocene epoch (34–24 million years ago). The fossil record provides evidence of the hominoid primates (apes) found in east Africa approximately 22–32 million ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Individual Apes
This is a list of non-human apes of encyclopedic interest. It includes individual chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and gibbons that are in some way famous or notable. Actors * Bam Bam, an orangutan, played Precious (Passions), Precious on the soap opera ''Passions''. * Buddha, an orangutan, played Clyde in the Clint Eastwood action-comedy film ''Any Which Way You Can'' (1980). Buddha was allegedly beaten to death by his trainer for stealing doughnuts from craft services. The weapon was an axe handle wrapped in newspaper and had been nicknamed a "Buddha club" since it had been previously used to discipline him. This claim has been disputed by the author William Munns. * Çarli (born 1993), a chimpanzee, starred in the live-action movie ''The Jungle Book (1994 film), The Jungle Book'' (1994) and in the Turkey, Turkish television series ''Çarli'' before retiring to Monkey World in Dorset, UK. * C.J., an orangutan, played in the 1981 film ''Tarzan the Ape Man''. * Clara, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kanzi
Kanzi (born October 28, 1980), also known by the lexigram (from the character 太), is a male bonobo who has been the subject of several studies on great ape language. According to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist who has studied the bonobo throughout her life, Kanzi has exhibited advanced linguistic aptitude. Despite his achievements in the use of language, Kanzi could still not approach the levels of an average 3-year-old child. Biography Kanzi was born to Lorel and Bosandjo at Yerkes Field Station at Emory University in 1980. Shortly after birth Kanzi was stolen and adopted by a more dominant female, Matata, the matriarch of the group. In 1985, Kanzi was moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. He was later relocated, along with his sister, Panbanisha, to the Great Ape Trust, in Des Moines, Iowa. The ill-fated facility, founded in 2004 by local businessman, Ted Townsend, closed after losing funding, experiencing allegations of neglec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jane Goodall
Dame Jane Morris Goodall (; born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall on 3 April 1934), formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. Seen as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees since she first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960, where she witnessed human-like behaviours amongst chimpanzees, including armed conflict. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. As of 2022, she is on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project. In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. Goodall is an honorary member of the World Future Council. Early years Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in 1934 in Hampstead, London, to businessman Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall (1907–2001) and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph (1906â ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Ape Language
Research into great ape language has involved teaching chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans to communicate with humans and with each other using sign language, physical tokens, lexigrams, and mimicking human speech. Some primatologists argue that these primates' use of the communication tools indicates their ability to use "language", although this is not consistent with some definitions of that term. Apes that demonstrate understanding Non-human animals have been recorded to have produced behaviors that are consistent with meanings accorded to human sentence productions. (A ''production'' is a stream of ''lexemes'' with semantic content. A language is grammar and a set of lexemes. A '' sentence'', or statement, is a stream of lexemes that obeys a grammar, with a beginning and an end.) Some animals in the following species can be said to "understand" (''receive''), and some can "apply" (''produce'') consistent, appropriate, grammatical streams of communication. David P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Schaller
George Beals Schaller (born 1933) is a German-born American mammalogist, biologist, conservationist and author. Schaller is recognized by many as the world's preeminent field biologist, studying wildlife throughout Africa, Asia and South America. Born in Berlin, Schaller grew up in Germany, but moved to Missouri as a teen. He is vice president of Panthera Corporation and serves as chairman of their Cat Advisory Council. Schaller is also a senior conservationist at the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society. Early life Schaller received his Bachelor of Biological Science degree from the University of Alaska in 1955, and went on to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to obtain his PhD in 1962. From 1962 to 1963, he was a fellow at the Behavioral Sciences department of Stanford University. From 1963 to 1966, Schaller served as research associate for the Johns Hopkins University pathobiology department, and from 1966 to 1972, served as the Rockefeller University's an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dian Fossey
Dian Fossey (, January 16, 1932 – ) was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her murder in 1985. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. ''Gorillas in the Mist'', a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name.Ware, Susan; Braukman, Stacy (2004). ''Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, Volume 5''. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. pp. 220–1. . Fossey was a leading primatologist, and a member of the "Trimates", a group of female scientists recruited by Leakey to study great apes in their natural environments, along with Jane Goodall who studies chimpanzees, and Biruté Galdikas, who studies orangutans. Fossey spent 20 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.jpg "Click for more on -> Primate")
