page_title: Primate
section_title: Classification of living primates
hierarchical_section_title: Primate / Classification of living primates
caption_attribution_description: English: Akha couple in northern Thailand. The husband is carrying the stem of a banana-plant, which will be fed to their pigs.
context_page_description: A primate is a eutherian mammal constituting the taxonomic order Primates. Primates arose 85–55 million years ago first from small terrestrial mammals, which adapted to living in the trees of tropical forests: many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging environment, including large brains, visual acuity, color vision, altered shoulder girdle, and dextrous hands. Primates range in size from Madame Berthe's mouse lemur, which weighs 30 g, to the eastern gorilla, weighing over 200 kg. There are 190–448 species of living primates, depending on which classification is used. New primate species continue to be discovered: over 25 species were described in the first decade of the 2000s, and eleven since 2010.
  Primates are divided into two distinct suborders. The first suborder is called strepsirrhines, which contains lemurs, galagos, and lorisids. These primates can be found throughout Africa, Madagascar, India, and Southeast Asia. The colloquial names of species ending in -nosed refer to the rhinarium of the primate. The second suborder is called haplorhines, which contains "dry-nosed" primates in the tarsier, monkey, and ape clades.
context_section_description: A list of the families of the living primates is given below, together with one possible classification into ranks between order and family. Other classifications are also used. For example, an alternative classification of the living Strepsirrhini divides them into two infraorders, Lemuriformes and Lorisiformes.
  Order Primates
  Suborder Strepsirrhini: lemurs, galagos and lorisids
  Infraorder Lemuriformes
  Superfamily Lemuroidea
  Family Cheirogaleidae: dwarf lemurs and mouse-lemurs (34 species)
  Family Daubentoniidae: aye-aye (one species)
  Family Lemuridae: ring-tailed lemur and allies (21 species)
  Family Lepilemuridae: sportive lemurs (26 species)
  Family Indriidae: woolly lemurs and allies (19 species)
  Superfamily Lorisoidea
  Family Lorisidae: lorisids (14 species)
  Family Galagidae: galagos (19 species)
  Suborder Haplorhini: tarsiers, monkeys and apes
  Infraorder Tarsiiformes
  Family Tarsiidae: tarsiers (11 species)
  Infraorder Simiiformes (or Anthropoidea)
  Parvorder Platyrrhini: New World monkeys
  Family Callitrichidae: marmosets and tamarins (42 species)
  Family Cebidae: capuchins and squirrel monkeys (14 species)
  Family Aotidae: night or owl monkeys (douroucoulis) (11 species)
  Family Pitheciidae: titis, sakis and uakaris (43 species)
  Family Atelidae: howler, spider, woolly spider and woolly monkeys (29 species)
  Parvorder Catarrhini
  Superfamily Cercopithecoidea
  Family Cercopithecidae: Old World monkeys (138 species)
  Superfamily Hominoidea
  Family Hylobatidae: gibbons or "lesser apes" (18 species)
  Family Hominidae: great apes, including humans (8 species)
  Order Primates was established by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, in the tenth edition of his book Systema Naturae, for the genera Homo (humans), Simia (other apes and monkeys), Lemur (prosimians) and Vespertilio (bats). In the first edition of the same book (1735), he had used the name Anthropomorpha for Homo, Simia and Bradypus (sloths). In 1839, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, following Linnaeus and imitating his nomenclature, established the orders Secundates (including the suborders Chiroptera, Insectivora and Carnivora), Tertiates (or Glires) and Quaternates (including Gravigrada, Pachydermata and Ruminantia), but these new taxa were not accepted.
  Before Anderson and Jones introduced the classification of Strepsirrhini and Haplorhini in 1984, (followed by McKenna and Bell's 1997 work Classification of Mammals: Above the species level), the Primates were divided into two superfamilies: Prosimii and Anthropoidea. Prosimii included all of the prosimians: Strepsirrhini plus the tarsiers. Anthropoidea contained all of the simians.
caption: Homo sapiens is the only living primate species that is fully bipedal
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