The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma/Mammalia/Class Mammalia/Subclass Eutheria/Order Primates/Suborder Anthropoidea/Family Cercopithecidæ/Subfamily Cercopithecinæ
Subfamily CERCOPITHECINÆ.
In this subfamily are included not only all the common Indian Monkeys except those belonging to the Hanuman or Langur group, but also the closely allied African forms belonging to the genera Cercopithecus and Cercocebus. The African Baboons (Cynocephalus), distinguished by having the nostrils quite at the end of the muzzle, are also included by many writers.
By Blyth, Jerdon, and others, the short-tailed Indian Monkeys were classed in the genus Inuus, the long-tailed Macaques in Macacus. But the type of Lacépède's original genus Macaca[1] (subsequently modified by F. Cuvier and Desmarest into Macacus) and of Inuus of Cuvier was the same animal, the Magot or Barbary Ape (Simia inuus, L.).
The "length of the tail is certainly, by itself, not a sufficient generic distinction amongst these monkeys, for there is a complete gradation from the tailless M. inuus, through the stump-tailed M. arctoides, to the pig-tailed M. nemestrinus, and thence to M. rhesus, which leads to the long-tailed Macaques. The most peculiar of the Indian foinns is M. silenus, which has by some naturalists been made the type of a distinct genus, Silenus. Even in this case, however, the only difference of any importance, the presence of a ruff of long hair round the face, is scarcely of generic rank. In the present work, all the Indian, Burmese, and Ceylonese species are comprised under Macacus.
A species of Macacus and two of Cynocephalus (the latter, as already noticed, now peculiar to Africa) have been discovered fossilin the Pliocene Siwalik beds of the Punjab. A tooth of Cynocephalus has also been found in the Pleistocene deposits of the Kurnool caves.
- ↑ Mém. de I'Inst. iii. p. 490 (1801).