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Pygmy marmosets The world’s smallest true monkeys. (The smallest primate is the pygmy mouse lemur.) Pygmy marmosets are not sexually dimorphic. Adults are about five inches (13 cm) long with an eight-inch (20 cm) tail and weigh four to seven ounces (113 to 199 g). The fur is buff and gray with yellow and green striations, which give it a grizzled effect on the head and back and a vague banded effect on the tail. They have long hair on their heads and chests giving the appearance of a mane. Their coloration provides great camouflage for their lives in the trees.
They are active and agile creatures, running, jumping, and occasionally leaping among trees and shrubs. These little monkeys move quadrupedally through the trees in an upright position. Their forelimbs are shorter than their hind limbs and they often feed while clinging upright to a trunk or branch with their sharp claws. They have claws on all digits except the big toe, which has a flat nail.
Their cryptic coloration and small size, along with movements that include squirrel-like dashes, sloth-like oozing over tree trunks and abrupt and frozen stillness can make them quite difficult for predators to see.
These marmosets are found in the Upper Amazon basin east of the Andes in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Northern Bolivia and Brazil. They have a patchy distribution in mature and secondary lowland rain forest, especially seasonally flooded forests, river margins, flood plains, and stream sides. They are rarely seen in the trees above 60 feet (18 m) or on the ground. |