Abstract
Snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus), or golden monkeys, are members of the subfamily Colobinae, family Cercopithecinae. They are very beautiful creatures, but are now distributed in very limited areas. The Sichuan species (Rhinopithecus roxellana), the Yunnan species (R. bieti), and the Guizhou species (R. brelichi) are endemic to China (Figure 1). Together with the Vietnamese species (R. avunculus), they were originally regarded as one genus (Napier and Napier, 1967). More recently they have been split, the Chinese forms being classified as one subgenus (R. [Rhinopithecus]) and the Vietnamese as another subgenus (R. [Prebytiscus]) (Jablonski and Peng, 1993; Jablonski, 1998a). Though limited to isolated regions, they form a graded array of species from R. avunculus in subtropical evergreen and deciduous broad-leaf forests at less than 1,000 m altitude to R. bieti in temperate, coniferous forests as high as 3,000 to 4,500 m where annual average temperatures hover near freezing (Pan and Yong, 1989; Boonratana and Le, 1998).
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Li, B., Jia, Z., Pan, R., Ren, B. (2003). Changes in Distribution of the Snub-Nosed Monkey in China. In: Marsh, L.K. (eds) Primates in Fragments. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3770-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3770-7_4
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