The magic of the Monkey House: new insights into the anatomy that makes primates primates.

JEFFREY T. LAITMAN*Associate Editor, The Anatomical RecordThe year 1958 began as a really horrible one for me.Two events made this so. The ﬁrst occurred in the earlyspring when I realized that the Brooklyn Dodgers—ourbaseball team and the soul of Brooklyn—had abandonedus and ﬂed to some bizarre place where people ate tacosinstead of Nathan’s franks and where it never snowed.Even their perennial nemesis—the New York Giants—left town for another unfathomable hamlet that wasalways having earthquakes. My almost 7-year-old mindcould not fathom all this; the heroes I worshipped(Jackie Robinson often patted my little crew-cut head)were gone forever. I even became a Yankees fan.My second crisis occurred before school ended in latespring. Our class had trip to the great American Mu-seum of Natural History in Manhattan. I loved museumtrips as I got to see dinosaurs, my second passion afterthe Dodgers. Tyrannosaurs, triceratops, hadrosaurs, Iloved them all, but none more than the brontosaurus. Iadored the big beasts with little heads, so much so, thatI could not help but go under the ropes to climb on one’stail to get ‘‘up close and personal.’’ Caught in this act ofdeﬁlement by a Goliath-sized museum guard, I washauled off by the scruff of the neck (those were the daysbefore ‘‘spare the rod’’ philosophy was in effect) andejected from the Museum. My teacher banned me fromfuture trips.Ejected and branded (all but a scarlet letter emblaz-oned on my forehead) in my seventh year. To make mat-ters worse, I had no project to write up for my schoolreport; no postcards of dinos or stuffed grizzlies or mete-orites to glue into a folder. I was sure the dreaded—andoft threatened—‘‘summer school’’ would be my fate. Andworst of all—what would I tell my mother? Oy!As I sat on the front steps of our Brooklyn home,watching the other kids play stickball or marbles, I pon-dered the enormity of my failure. Lost in my melancholy,I didn’t notice my father come home. I was glad he sawme before my mother as she was the disciplinarian andhe a gentle Parisian who would say something I didn’tunderstand in French and not get too angry. When Iexplained what happened, he just said he had an idea,and I should get up early on Sunday.When Sunday arrived, my dad bundled me into ourold Chevy and set off:::to the Bronx Zoo. ‘‘Forget thedead animals,’’ dad said, ‘‘let’s look at live ones.’’ Thiswas my ﬁrst time at the Bronx zoo and I was riveted toall the sights and sounds, but, truthfully, nothing set myheart to ﬂutter. The elephants were big, but smelledfoul; the seals and sea lions looked and sounded likedogs; the rhinos reminded me of garbage trucks; I wasscared of cats the size of small cars. And then I saw asight that would forever change my world: The MonkeyHouse.I sat and stared at the assortment of baboons andmacaques and squirrel monkeys for most of the day.While I had seen some stuffed ones in the Museum, Inever realized that these animals looked and acted somuch like my family and friends. I even started to namethem in my mind after relatives: there was Aunt Flo, bigand bossy; Uncle Joe, snoozing away; Cousin Richie,climbing all over his brother Irwin, on and on. They hadhands and ﬁngers and toes that seemed to do all that Icould do, and I envisioned them talking together andplanning their day. And then it happened: as I ponderedmy new hairy family, a wad of poop landed smack on mycrew-cut head, thrown by some impish baboon. ‘‘Wow!’’my shocked little mind took a moment to cogitate,‘‘Poop! They hit me with poop! These guys got attitude;they are deﬁnitely cool. They could make it inBrooklyn.’’A bond was forged that day between those poop-throw-ing cousins and me, one that has led me on my own ca-reer path: to understand our place among thoseremarkable relatives. Like most of us who spend ourdays trying to ﬁgure out why we pay taxes and theserelatives don’t, or how their historical trajectory landedthem in the zoo and we were able to enjoy (albeit mo-mentarily for some) the excitement of pondering dino-saurs at a museum, I’m always torn between myscientist’s focused curiosity to discover the nuances ofour collective anatomical similarities and a profound ad-oration for these kin. I know it might sound a tad odd tothose whose science keeps them at some emotional dis-tance from their object of study (I know you can’t get tooemotional over a zebraﬁsh, drosophila, or an endoplas-mic reticulum), but one of the traits I’ve found shared byprimate biologists—anatomists, paleontologists, anthro-pologists, lab and ﬁeldworker alike—is our emotionalties to the animals we study. There is undisputable joyin our science, but it is also inseparably coupled with anoverriding knowledge that we are studying ourselves.