The Tarsier
The Tarsier, is the size and shape of a tall Bush Baby. It has a long near-naked tail tufted at the end, greatly elongated leaping legs and long fingered grasping hands and gigantic glaring eyes (150 times bigger in proportion to the rest of its body, than our own) which face directly forward. If this animal needs to see something to one side, it has to turn its whole head. Together with these spectacular eyes, the tarsier has paper-thin ears, like those of a bat, that can be twisted and crinkled so as to focus on a particular sound. With these two highly developed sensory organs it hunts at night for insects, small reptiles and even fledgling birds. It also marks territories with urine although its sense of smell is not likely to be good. A look at its nose not only confirms this but reveals that the animal is quite distinct from all other prosimians. For one thing, the eyes are so huge that there is little room in the font of the skull for the nose itself and the internal nasal passages are very much reduced in caparison with, say, a Bush Baby's. The nostrils are not comma-shaped nor are they surrounded by bare moist skin, as are the noses of lemurs and other prosimians. In this it resembles monkeys and apes and it is tempting therefore to see the tarsier as representing an ancestral form from which all the higher primates are descended. Indeed, this was once held to be the case. Today it is argued that this little creature is so specialised a leaper and nocturnal hunter that it could hardly have given rise directly to monkeys. Nonetheless, it is seen as a close relative of those early primates which, fifty million years ago, spread widely through the world displacing most of the prosimians and ultimately populating both the Old and New worlds with monkeys.
