Introduction to the special issue on What they do in the shadows : new perspectives on Africa’s nocturnal bushbabies

Abstract

Among continental Africa’s endemic primates, the bushbabies or galagos (family Galagidae, or Galonigidae, Groves, 2001) have been described as the most successful radiation of strepsirrhine primates in terms of species diversity and geographic range (Fleagle, 2013; Nekaris & Bearder, 2011). Currently, more than two dozen species have been named across six genera (Penna & Pozzi, 2024). All members of this clade are nocturnal (Bearder, 1999), in contrast to the lemurs of Madagascar (which include nocturnal, diurnal, and cathemeral species; LaFleur et al., 2014) and the haplorrhine primates, with two nocturnal taxa (Southeast Asia’s tarsiers, and South America’s owl monkeys; Fleagle, 2013). Along with the lorisids and Malagasy lemurs, the strepsirrhine primates (previously the prosimian primates, minus Southeast Asia’s tarsiers) have been described, and long viewed, as the “poor sister group” of the primates (Martin, 1993:192). This can be seen in the contrasting large number of publications on the anthropoid (i.e., haplorrhine [monkeys and apes plus the tarsiers]) primates, especially the great apes and baboons (Sauther et al., 2015). What follows is an introduction to a special issue on the galagos/bushbabies. This introduction puts the special issue into context, by providing a short history of the study of this group, a summary of their evolution and divergence from other primate clades, comments on their conservation status, and brief synopses of the papers included in this volume.