My readers are awesome IV

Credit for today's awesome monkey shot goes to Molly, who thought outside the box and convinced me that prosimians should certainly count for purposes of awesome monkey photos.

So here we see the pygmy slow loris (Nycticebus pygmaeus), which, as befits anything with "pygmy" in the name, is tiny, and fond of biting on people (those are gloved fingers he's attempting to gnaw), and possessed of poisonous elbows.

No, I am not making this up. To quote the equally awesome page Molly pointed me to:

The lorises are actually toxic! On the inside of their elbows, sebaceous tissue secretes a toxin (like sweat pores, which is rather fitting since the toxic mixture smells remarkably like sweaty socks). The lorises take it into their mouth and deliver it in the bite. It is not the upper and lower jaw vampire like canine teeth that deliver this toxin. It is the innocuously small teeth in the front of the lower jaw which slope forward and help conduct the saliva into the wound.

Note: this page is also worth going to for its pictures of topless scientists. (There's a phrase guaranteed to turn up all sorts of Google traffic, huh?) It's fascinating reading, especially when you get to the part explaining what role the toxin plays.

Note II: Another reason you guys are awesome? Because your comments on the Gap entry rock.

Comments

[Nicolas]

Whoa! Hot shirtless primatologist alert!

I'm loving these monkey (et al) photos. It's so great to see how my distant cousins look and live!

As long as you're accepting non-monkeys, how about a bit on the Aye-Aye? They're an endangered prosimian species native to Madagascar, and immortalized by the late, great Douglas Adams in his book "Last Chance to See".

Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aye-aye

Other pages:

http://www.animalinfo.org/species/primate/daubmada.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildfacts/factfiles/327.shtml

http://www.thewildones.org/Animals/ayeAyeNH.html (that one's got a sound file)