LEMUR

Lemur

Lemurs are a clade of strepsirrhine primates endemic to the island of Madagascar. The word "lemur" derives from the word lemures from Roman mythology and was first used to describe a slender loris due to its nocturnal habits and slow pace, but was later applied to the primates on Madagascar. Although lemurs often are confused with ancestral primates, the anthropoid primates did not evolve from them; instead, lemurs merely share morphological and behavioral traits with basal primates. Lemurs arrived in Madagascar around 62 to 65 mya by rafting on mats of vegetation at a time when ocean currents favored oceanic dispersal to the island. Since that ...

The above text is a snippet from Wikipedia: Lemur
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lemur

Noun

  1. Any strepsirrhine primate of the infraorder Lemuriformes, superfamily Lemuroidea, native only to Madagascar and some surrounding islands.
  2. The genus Lemur, represented by the ring-tailed lemur ().
  3. The genus for a loris (, now ), predating the 10th edition of Systema Naturæ.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: lemur
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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