February 25, 2008. After swabbing the cheeks of more than 200 lemurs and related primates to collect their DNA, researchers at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) and Duke Lemur Center now have a much clearer picture of their evolutionary family tree. Read the full story here.
May 14, 2007. A surprisingly complete fossil skull of an ancient relative of humans, apes and monkeys bears striking evidence that our remote ancestor was less mentally advanced than expected by about 29 million years ago. Read the full story here.
April 26, 2006. Paleontologists at the Duke Lemur Center have assembled a new picture of a 35-million-year-old fossil mammal — and they even have added a hint of sound. By painstakingly measuring hundreds of specimens of a fossil mammal called Thyrohyrax, recovered from the famous fossil beds of Egypt’s Fayum Province, the researchers determined that males of […]
August 9, 2004. A “stink fight” between ring-tailed lemurs might be dead serious to them. But to observers, the scented struggle ranks among the more odd, even comical sights at the Duke University Primate Center. Preparations for battle begin when male combatants load their “weapons” — vigorously rubbing their tails against their shoulders and between their wrists, […]
May 12, 2004. Until now, primatologists believed lemurs to be primitive, ancient offshoots of the primate family tree, with far less intelligence than their more sophisticated cousins, monkeys, apes and humans. But at the Duke University Primate Center, with the gentle touch of his nose to a computer screen, the ringtail lemur called Aristides is teaching […]
October 23, 2003. Duke University officials have announced that the Duke University Primate Center has made sufficient progress toward improving its research and educational programs that the university will commit to maintaining and enhancing the center for the foreseeable future. The center is the world’s only research and education center devoted to prosimians and comprises the […]
July 17, 2003. It was a dramatic demonstration when former Primate Center technician Jennifer Campbell mounded two piles of lemur food — one large, one much smaller — on a table a few years ago. Her point: The center had been unknowingly overfeeding its animals. The larger pile of pounds of food pellets, cabbage and bananas represented […]
March 26, 2003. A small collection of teeth and jaw fragments sifted from the Egyptian desert has provided the earliest fossil evidence for one of the three major lines of primates. The tiny fossils offer evidence that the ancestors of bushbabies and lorises appeared during the Eocene epoch that lasted from 55 million to 34 million years […]
