Why Monkey and Apes Have Colorful Faces

Have you ever wondered why monkeys and apes have such colorful faces? Primate species living complex social groups and experts think that monkeys and apes use spatial features as a way to recognize all the members of the group. Researchers from the University of California Los Angelos for UCLA compared to complexity official trades across different primate species and put the data alongside information about group size and certain habitat factors to see if there was any correlation. Michael Farrell, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA who led the study said: faces are really important to how monkeys and apes can tell one another apart. We think the color patterns have to do both with the importance of telling individuals at your own species apart from closely related species and social communication among members at the same species Results of the study show that Old World monkeys and apes in Africa in Asia living in larger groups have more facial diversity than living in smaller social groups However, a previous study found that:

for New World monkeys living in Central and South America the opposite is true and species living in larger groups had more similar faces