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| Geoffroy's marmoset |
Last month, I looked at the three species of
marmoset inhabiting the northern half of the Atlantic Forest along the east coast of Brazil. Further south, the forests naturally become cooler - which is to say, that they're merely subtropical, rather than fully tropical. All of the marmosets inhabiting the Atlantic Forest are closely related, belonging to the genus
Callithrix, and many of them are capable of interbreeding with one another. They all descend, most likely, from a single species that lived around the early Pleistocene, just before the Ice Ages, and which presumably crossed over what is now the relatively sparsely forested cerrado from the more fertile Amazon to the north and west.
Leaving behind Wied's marmoset, we now hop over the Jequitinhonha River to its southern bank, and a stretch of forest that heads about another two hundred miles or so down the coast. This is the home of
Geoffroy's marmoset (
Callithrix geoffroyi), also called the "white-headed marmoset". In fact,
Geoffroy has quite a few species named after him, and is a key figure in the development of mammalian classification. Living in France around the turn of the nineteenth century, he was an early proponent of the theory of evolution - although, dying fifteen years before the publication of
On the Origin of Species, he had most of the details of
how it worked wrong.
