clipped from: news.yahoo.com WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists for the first time in more than eight decades have observed a living pygmy tarsier, one of the planet's smallest and rarest primates.
The tarsiers, which some scientists believed were extinct, may not have been overly thrilled to be found. One of them chomped Sharon Gursky-Doyen, a Texas A&M University professor of anthropology who took part in the expedition.
"I'm the only person in the world to ever be bitten by a pygmy tarsier," Gursky-Doyen said in a telephone interview.
Tarsiers are unusual primates -- the mammalian group that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes and people. The handful of tarsier species live on various Asian islands.
They are nocturnal insectivores and are unusual among primates in that they have claws rather than finger nails.