Caipora bambuiorum Cartelle & Hartwig, 1996
Giant spider monkey
Taxonomy & Nomenclature
Protonym: Caipora bambuiorum Cartelle & Hartwig, 1996
Conservation Status
Extinct
Last record: c. 8,000 BC (estimate)
Distribution
Brazil
Biology & Ecology
A huge species of spider which became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene or the start of the Holocene, it is estimated to have weighed some 20kg or 75% more than the largest living atelines (Cartelle & Hartwig, 1996).
Hypodigm
Holotype: IGC-UFMG 05 ("nearly complete skeleton")
Media
References
Original scientific description:
Cartelle, Castor and Hartwig, Walter Carl. (1996). A new extinct primate among the Pleistocene megafauna of Bahia, Brazil. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 93: 6405-6409.
Other references:
Araújo, André Vieira et al. (2025). Metabolic bone disease in an extinct neotropical primate. International Journal of Paleopathology 48: 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpp.2024.11.003
Groves, Colin. (2001). Primate Taxonomy. Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hartwig, W. C. and Cartelle, C. (1996) A complete skeleton of the giant South American primate Protopithecus. Nature 381: 307-311.
Lemoine, Rhys Taylor, Buitenwerf, Robert, Faurby, Sören and Svenning, Jens-Christian. (2025). Phylogenetic Evidence Supports the Effect of Traits on Late-Quaternary Megafauna Extinction in the Context of Human Activity. Global Ecology and Biogeography 34(7): e70078. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.70078 [Supporting Information: Data S1]
Smith F. A., Lyons S. K., Ernest S. K. M., Jones K. E., Kaufman D. M., Dayan T., Marquet P. A., Brown J. H. and Haskell J. P. (2003). Body mass of late Quaternary mammals. Ecology 84(12): 3403-3403.
Turvey, Samuel T. (2009). Holocene mammal extinctions, pp. 41-61. In: Turvey, Samuel T. (ed.). Holocene Extinctions. Oxford, UK & New York, USA: Oxford University Press. xii + 352 pp.
Turvey, Samuel T. and Fritz, Susanne A. (2011). The ghosts of mammals past: biological and geographical patterns of global mammalian extinction across the Holocene. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366(1577): 2564-2576. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0020 [Supplementary Information]