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:
Groves, Colin. (2001). Primate taxonomy. Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hartwig WC and Cartelle C (1996) A complete skeleton of the giant South American primate Protopithecus. Nature 381, 307–311.
Smith F.A., Lyons S.K., Ernest S.K.M., Jones K.E., Kaufman D.M., Dayan T., Marquet P.A., Brown J.H., 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]