Dec 15 2007
Philippine Tarsier (Bohol)
I remember an classmate bringing a strange-looking creature — small but with huge eyes — to school back in elementary. While we called it kuwago because of its big eyes, the term kuwago more properly refers to a bird that also has big eyes — the owl. It’s known locally as mawmag. The tarsier is closely associated with Bohol, although it’s also found in the neighboring islands of Leyte, Samar and parts of Mindanao. Indeed, when you say Bohol, you think of beautiful beaches, chocolate hills, peanut kisses, the Loboc river and the world-famous Loboc children’s choir, and, of course, the tarsier.
An endangered species, the Philippine tarsier (scientific name, tarsius syrichta) has fixed eyes, but that’s not a problem because the tarsier could rotate its head 180 degrees. It’s one of the smallest known primates and can fit comfortably in a human’s hand. There’s a bit of controversy whether it’s a monkey or something else. Consider this entry from Wikipedia: “The Philippine Tarsier has been called “the world’s smallest monkey” or “smallest primate” by locals before. However, the Philippine Tarsier is neither a monkey nor the smallest primate. It is related to other primates, including monkeys, lemurs, gorillas and humans but it occupies a small evolutionary branch between the strepsirrhine prosimians, and the haplorrhine simians. While it is a prosimian, and used to be grouped with the rest of the prosimians, it has some phylogenetic features that caused scientists to classify it as a haplorrhine and, therefore, more closely related to apes and monkeys than to the other prosimians.” Confused? Just see the tarsier when you travel to Bohol.
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[...] interesting is that it looks pretty much like the Philippine tarsier, which is shown in a previous post. It seems that the pygmy tarsier is different from the Philippine tarsier (see photo below). The [...]