Lemurs were named for Roman ghosts, but not because they look spooky
Linnaeus borrowed the word lemur from the restless spirits of Roman festivals. The popular story says he was thinking of glowing eyes and eerie cries. In fact his own note explains he chose it for a slow, night-roaming loris, and the name later settled on Madagascar's primates, now the world's most endangered mammals.
In the 1758 edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus placed three animals in his genus Lemur: a slender loris, the ring-tailed lemur and a Philippine colugo. He knew the ghostly lemures from Virgil and Ovid. A 2012 review showed that the widespread explanations, spooky looks or Malagasy beliefs about ancestral souls, were mistaken; Linnaeus wrote that he picked the name because the animals move slowly by night and resemble humans in some way. Today only the ring-tailed lemur remains in the genus Lemur, while the word covers all of Madagascar's primates.
Lemurs did not give rise to monkeys and apes; they evolved separately after reaching Madagascar. The island had split from Africa roughly 160 million years ago, so their ancestors, thought to have originated in Africa some 62 to 65 million years ago, had to cross a channel at least 560 kilometres wide. Paleontologist William Diller Matthew suggested in 1915 that small populations rafted across on mats of vegetation, and George Gaylord Simpson later called such chance crossings the sweepstakes hypothesis. A 2010 study found that around 60 million years ago ocean currents ran toward the island rather than away from it.
Isolation produced about 100 living species, from Madame Berthe's mouse lemur at 30 grams, the smallest primate on Earth, to the indri at around 9 kilograms. Many cope with scarce, seasonal food through low metabolism, fat storage, torpor or hibernation, strict breeding seasons and female dominance. They rely more on scent and calls than on visual signals.
Humans arrived roughly 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, and slash-and-burn farming confined lemurs to about 10 per cent of the island. At least 17 larger species have since vanished, including Archaeoindris, which weighed perhaps 160 to 200 kilograms. In 2013 the IUCN warned that up to 90 per cent of lemur species could face extinction in the wild within 20 to 25 years. Local taboos called fady help protect some forests, but logging and poverty undermine conservation.
Source: Lemur
