Gibbon freaks out over hedgehog

This is an interesting wildlife park in the lake district. These amazing animals look like a mini yeti or something. All of their mannerisms are certainly hilarious. They act like a human who just heard something scary outside. It's pretty impressive how the fantastic animal scales that long pole in quick graceful motions. Gibbons are meant to live in trees. They probably don't know what to do with their arms when there are no branches around. Some of them look like they are meditating. Some gibbons can drop like 20 feet out of a tree like it was nothing.

Gibbons are actually apes in the family Hylobatidae. The family historically contained one genus, but now is split into 4 extant genera and 18 species. Gibbons certainly live in areas of subtropical and tropical rainforest from eastern Bangladesh to Northeast India to southern China and Indonesia (including the islands of Sumatra, Borneo, and Java).

They are also called the lesser apes or smaller apes. Gibbons differ from great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and humans) in the fact that they are smaller. They differ also in the fact that they do not make nests.

In some ways, gibbons appear to more closely resemble monkeys than great apes do. However, like all apes, gibbons are tailless. It is also interesting that unlike most of the great apes, gibbons frequently form long-term pair bonds.

Their primary mode of locomotion is called "brachiation." Brachiation is also known as arm swinging. It is a form of arboreal locomotion in which primates swing from tree limb to tree limb using only their strong arms. During the making of brachiation, the body is alternately supported under each forelimb. Amazingly, this involves swinging from branch to branch for distances up to 15 m (50 ft), at speeds as high as 55 km/h (34 mph). These fascinating animals can also make leaps up to 8 m (26 ft). They can walk bipedally with their arms raised for balance. They are the fastest and most agile of all tree-dwelling, nonflying mammals.

Interesting gibbon species include: the siamang, the white-handed or lar gibbon, and the hoolock gibbons.

The evolutionary history of gibbons is interesting. Genome molecular dating analyses indicate that the gibbon lineage diverged from that of great apes at about 16.8 million years ago.