Anyone know why?
Several of the southern states, plus Hawaii, have tropical climates that would be perfect for them. I’m surprised none came over during the Great American Interchange.
Are there climates/ecologies between North & South America, that would support them?
Or large desert areas?
Question largely answered.
I suggest a move to GQ. All I have is joke answers.
Welcome to the SDMB, ArztWolf. Fact-based questions like this go in our General Questions forum, so I’ve moved the thread there for you.
Enjoy your stay!
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
They don’t like North America because they get the funniest looks from everyone they meet.
From Popular Science:
ArztWolf writes:
> . . . Hawaii . . .
Hawaii has no native land animals. By native, I mean ones that arrived before the Polynesians did (sometime after 500 A.D.). There’s no way that they could have reached the islands without human help. This (not particularly reliable) webpage lists some native animals of Hawaii:
The critically endangered Geoffroy’s Spider Monkey occurs as far north as the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which at its northern edge, borders on the USA. That is generally considered to be North America.
There is a lengthy article which, coincidentally, has almost exactly the same title as this thread:
What is generally referred to as “Central America” is actually part of North America. Plenty of monkeys in Central America.
There are monkeys that live in Japan, which has a climate considerably colder than much of North America.
That article is pretty garbled and doesn’t really get the time lines right.
At the beginning of the Age of Mammals in the Paleocene, 65 million years ago, North and South America were widely separated. North America was intermittently connected to Asia and Europe.
The first true primates are known from around the beginning of the Eocene about 55 million years ago. They were prosimians, resembling modern tarsiers, bushbabies, and lemurs. During the Eocene they are known from North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. These primates became extinct in North America around the end of Eocene 35 million years ago, but they survived in the Old World.
Monkeys arose in the Old World around the start of the Oligocene around 35 million years ago. The first monkeys appeared in South America later in the Oligocene, about 30 million years ago. Remarkably, they seem to have come from Africa by rafting on floating vegetation. Certain groups of rodents seem to have come to South America the same way about this time.
Unlike their Old World counterparts, the New World Monkey seem to have always been pretty much confined to tropical forest. They evolved no terrestrial forms like baboons, and don’t extend much or at all into temperate areas like some Old World Monkeys do.
Once the Panama land bridge closed between 3 and 4 million years ago, these South American monkeys participated in the Great American Biotic Interchange like many other groups. It just so happens that, because they are confined to tropical forests, they never made it past southern Mexico. This is similar to many other groups of South American mammals, birds, plants, and others.
You no doubt meant mammals.
I don’t know how accurate this is, buthere’s a distribution map.
Yes, I should have said “mammals.”
I’ve seen Grey Langur monkeys at 6,000 feet in the Himalays – hey range as high as 13,000 feet.
It’s reasonably accurate. From the map, you can see that Old World Monkeys range into temperate areas in Japan and northern and southern Africa, while New World Monkeys are entirely confined to the tropics.
By way of a generality, during the Great Biotic Interchange temperate-adapted mammals from North America did well in South America, while very few South American mammals did well in temperate North America. Today the only ones of the latter that survive are the Virginia Opossum, Nine-banded Armadillo, and North American Porcupine. Mammals of South American origin are mainly confined to the tropical areas of North America/Central America. This may be due to the relative amounts of land in each zone in each continent, North America having most of its area in the temperate zone, and most of South America being tropical.
There’s wild monkeys in Florida.
Not that they’re really SUPPOSED to be there, but they seem to get along just fine.
I didn’t say colder–more arid, is the issue.
South Carolina has monkeys, too.
It’s home to a colony of free-ranging rhesus monkeys used in research that was transferred from Puerto Rico in 1979.
I have seen monkeys in the wild in Costa Rica, so I would say yes.
The Wikipedia article on The Great American Interchange adds more concerning what Colibri posted.
The section on the lopsided-ness of the interchange is especially interesting. Central America is a bottleneck. If a species can reach and survive there, it’s much easier to spread south than north due to similarity of climate.
There had been some primates in the Caribbean but they are all extinct except for some islands near South America and introduced species.