One difference between chimpanzees and monkeys
A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can't.
Chimpanzee facts and facts about chimpanzees.
14 facts on this shelf
A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can't.
In 2005, Ai Ai, a 27-year-old chimpanzee living at a zoo in northern China's Shaanxi province quit smoking after 16 years. Zoo keepers helped by providing therapy that included walking, music therapy, and exercise according to the Xinhua news agency said.
Researchers identified 17 distinct facial movements in horses, more than they found in chimpanzees, which shows how expressive horse faces really are.
Apes like chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans aren't monkeys. One easy way to tell them apart is that apes don't have tails.
Humans share about 98.7% of their DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos, which makes them our closest living relatives.
In 1960, Jane Goodall saw a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard using a grass stem to "fish" for termites, proving that humans weren't the only animals that make and use tools.
Chimpanzees can be violent. From 1974 to 1978, researchers at Gombe watched one chimp community wipe out a rival group in what's known as the Gombe Chimpanzee War.
A chimpanzee named Ham became the first great ape in space in 1961, helping NASA prove that humans could perform tasks during spaceflight.
Chimpanzees are stronger than humans, but not superhero-level. A 2017 study found their muscles are about 1.35 times as powerful as ours, much less than the "five times stronger" myth.
A chimpanzee named Washoe learned around 350 signs of American Sign Language, making her one of the first non-human animals taught to communicate with human signs.
A young chimpanzee named Ayumu outperformed human adults on a test that required memorizing the positions of numbers flashed on a screen for a split second.
Chimpanzees build a fresh sleeping nest in the trees almost every night by bending and weaving branches and leaves together.
Chimpanzees have been observed eating bitter plants that aren't part of their usual diet when they're sick, possibly to treat parasites, an example of animal self-medication.
Chimpanzees are listed as endangered because of habitat loss, poaching, and disease, and their wild numbers have declined sharply over the past century.