It looks as though we are moving right along with the Wild Facts this week.  I don’t know about all of you but this week is starting to move at an incredibly quick pace.  Perhaps this is due to the fact that I am trying to get things ready for my move from the Yukon back to Ontario.  That’s right, I am moving out of the North and into Canada’s Capital city (no, not Toronto!).  As a result, next week will be a theme week so if you have any cool themes then please leave them in the comment section below.  My only other problem is finding time to write these facts before my Internet is disconnected.  But I will try my best!  Okay, enough of the personal update – let’s move onto the exciting stuff.  Today we are heading to Africa (I know we were just there a couple of days ago but I want to go back) to learn about the Vervet Monkey.  This particular monkey is considered to be an Old World Monkey and is often referred to just as “Vervet”.

The Vervet Monkey is apparently closely related to a couple of other African monkey’s.  These close relatives are the Grivet and the Malbrouck (perhaps we will discuss these two species in a future Wild Fact).  All three species are closely related but all live in different territories and in different locations.  In fact, these similar monkey’s rarely come in contact with each other.  Don’t you just hate it when you drift apart from your family?

On average, the Vervet will be anywhere between 46 – 66 cm (17.9 – 25.7 “) long with a tail that is typically longer than their body.  Not only do they have a long tail but their arms and legs are also very long.  This provides the Vervet with the ability to run on all fours and they just happen to be pretty gosh darn quick on the ground. Although they are swift runners the Vervet Monkey spends most of their time in the trees (hence the super long tail).  Believe it or not, you will be hard-pressed to find a Ververt Monkey more than 450 meters from a tree.  This makes sense since these trees provide protection from predators, food and of course a wickedly cool tree-house.

Vervet Monkey Fast Fact – Typically the males are larger than the females but if you don’t want to use size to determine the sex of your monkey friend, you can always tell by the male’s bright blue………ummmm…..testicles.  This would definitely make identification a lot easier for all those monkey researchers.

Well, it looks like we are done monkeying around for the day so we should get back to work.  Enjoy the rest of your day!