Welcome to the newsletter for the Living Links to Human Evolution Research Centre, your source of all things monkey – and more!
RESEARCH
The past month has been very exciting! We’ve had researchers investigating the following topics:
– Risk taking behaviours
– Sequence cognition (the ability to learn and understand sequences)
Scroll down read about our Researcher of the Month, and click here to visit our blog!
VISITOR EXPERIENCE
We’re starting the summer off with a bang at Living Links, introducing new signage and interactives! Come by the zoo to see the exciting changes in person.
We’ve also just wrapped up filming for some fun new videos about the centre and its research, so watch this space 👀
MONKEY BUSINESS
There’s never a dull day at Living Links. After months of renovations to the monkeys’ indoor enclosures, everything is open again and the monkeys are loving their new climbing frames.
Our monkey in the spotlight for July is the lovely Sol! She is one of the lower ranking female capuchins on the East Wing. Though she is always a bit nervous of the other monkeys, she has been coming into research more and more and enjoying her share of the tasty treats. Good job Sol!
This month, our researcher in the spotlight is Dr. Emma McEwen.
Emma has recently joined the team as a postdoctoral research fellow and but she’s no stranger to the primates at Edinburgh Zoo! During her PhD, Emma worked down at the Budongo Research Unit. Part of her research involved introducing the chimpanzees to virtual environment games, which she used to study the chimpanzees’ navigation skills and landmark use. In her role here at Living Links, Emma will be working with PhD student Andreea Miscov to train the capuchin monkeys to play similar virtual environment games. Through her research, Emma seeks to better understand the diversity of intelligence across species. Visit her Twitter to learn more.