Sunday, August 12, 2012

For Annie D

Are Geladas different from true baboons?



UPDATE: She replies "Too different. That's why I broke up with him." (The Kapcha wouldn't let her in). She also made a point about aposematic coloration, convergent evolution, geladas, and black widow spiders--! Later, maybe...

3 comments:

Retrieverman said...

That's a good question!

There's almost no genetic research on them, and I've seen them placed with other baboons in texts from the 70's and 80's.

But almost everyone has them in their own genus.

Mandrills (of which there are now two species) and drills have been moved into their own genus after years of being considered Papio baboons.

So it's pretty complex.

Hamadryas baboons have hybridized with Rhesus macaques (Rheboon, which were sterile), so it's probably likely that all of these baboons and baboon-like monkeys can hybridize.

There are fertile hybrids within Papio baboons. https://www.princeton.edu/~baboon/Charpentier,%20et%20al.%202012.pdf

Retrieverman said...

Correction, there are two species in Mandrillus, not two species of mandrill.

Steve Bodio said...

I sent this, adapted from Wikipedia, to Annie: ""Since 1979, it has been customary to place the gelada in its own particular genus (Theropithecus), though some genetic research suggests [it] should in fact be grouped with its papionine kin; other researchers have classified this species even farther distant from Papio. While Theropithecus gelada is the only living species of its genus, separate, larger species are known from the fossil record... Theropithecus, while restricted at present to Ethiopia, is also known from fossil specimens found in Africa and the Mediterranean into Asia... [as far as India]"