Facts About Monkeys

Monkeys have an incredible capacity to learn. They can use tools, and some are even trained to help people with disabilities. Many species of monkey are kept as pets, or used as models in labs and on space missions. They appear in many movies and TV shows, including The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, and in books like the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, and Curious George are both monkeys that are widely known in popular culture.

Monkeys are diurnal (active during the day) and social creatures that typically live together in a group called a troop. They primarily inhabit rainforests on all continents except Antarctica.

They move about by clinging and jumping through the trees, walking on all fours (quadrupedalism) and using their tails for balance and movement. Most monkeys have prehensile tails, which they can grasp onto branches and other objects with.

In the wild, monkeys eat a wide variety of plant-based foods as well as insects, snails, birds’ eggs and meat from snakes, lizards, bats and small mammals. Some monkeys are omnivorous; others are frugivorous or carnivorous.

Monkeys have long digestive tracts for digesting leaves; some, like colobus monkeys and langurs, have chambered stomachs that allow for specialized fermentation to digest the leaf matter, similar to how ruminants do. Geladas, on the other hand, are the only Old World monkey species to graze on grass. They fill their cheek pouches with fruit, seeds, leaves and other edibles while foraging during the day and then chew, swallow and regurgitate their food to extract the nutrient value.