What Is Brachiation?
Brachiation—arboreal locomotion via arms swinging hand over hand through the trees—is an interesting form of locomotion unique to long armed apes. In primatology [198], apes are in the anthropoid families, which is common to man, and they are classified into two families. One of them is Pongidae including the gorilla, chimpanzee and orang-utan, and the other is Hylobatidae including the gibbon and siamang which are arboreal in habitat in tropical rain forest of Southeast Asia [198]. In fact, apes and monkeys are quite different anatomically. One of the basic differences between apes and monkeys is that apes have much greater flexibility of movement in their long forelimbs than monkeys—with their free swinging arms that rotate at shoulders, apes can travel in arm swinging locomotion while monkeys are basically quadrupeds [56].
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Fukuda, T., Hasegawa, Y., Sekiyama, K., Aoyama, T. (2012). Brachiation. In: Multi-Locomotion Robotic Systems. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 81. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30135-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30135-3_4
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