10 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT MONKEYS
1The word ‘monkey’ is a composite of the Old Norse term ‘Monn’ (meaning to ‘fling shit’) and the Anglo-Saxon verb ‘Kee’ (meaning to ‘tamper with a car aerial in a safari park’).
2Many
Many of our favourite pop stars have been influenced by monkeys - whether it’s Oasis funnyman LIAM GALLAGHER swaggering about like a pissed-up chimp, or deceased rocker GG ALLIN hurling his own excrement at the audience.
3The
smallest monkey of all time belonged to the world’s smallest man - CALVIN PHILLIPS. The minuscule macaque - named TINY KONG - was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, and was roughly the size of a small mouse on its hind legs. Phillips had it shipped to his home in Essex after he became obsessed with the 1978 Clint Eastwood comedy Every
Which Way But Loose, and decided he wanted a cheeky primate pal of his own. The pint-sized pair got into all manner of scrapes, driving around the American west in a pick-up truck the size of a breadbin.
4The
current world record for the furthest distance of faeces flung against a wall by a primate was set by Urko, a 350 pound western lowland gorilla from the Democratic Republic of Congo. On 27 March 2005, with representatives from the
Guinness Book of World Records in attendance, Urko successfully hurled a lump of his own excrement against a brick wall that was a whopping 175 FEET away.
5Despite
Despite numerous films featuring the giant 100 foot gorilla, King Kong could never exist in real life. That’s because, according to monkey experts, as a gorilla gets bigger the tensile strength of its bones increases with the square of its height whilst the animal’s weight - and hence the stress on its bones - increases with the cube of its height. As it grew past 33’8”, a King Kong’s legs would snap like matchsticks. 6A 6 Mighty Joe Young could exist, though, as he was only about 25’ high.
7Believe
it or not, U2 frontman BONO adopted his famous nickname because of his long-standing admiration for the “bonobo” species of chimpanzee, merely dropping the final “bo”. The short-arsed pop fave, real name George O’Dowd, told Puzzler magazine: “I saw a chimp’s tea party at the circus in Dublin when I was a kid, and the bonobo monkey particularly stood out because he was wearing a cute little bowler hat. I was especially impressed because it turned out that he’d had the hat flown halfway around the world in a private jet from his home in Central Africa.” 8There are currently a whopping 264 different species of monkey, such as mandrills, macaques and 262 more. Celebs who cite mandrills as their favourite type of monkey include Fleetwood Mac rocker STEVIE NICKS, , Middlesbrough FC manager TONY PULIS and EastEnders actor DEAN GAFFNEY. 9Celebs who cite macaques as their favourite type of monkey include Fifty Shades hunk JAMIE DORNAN, snooker ace WILLIE THORNE and gangsta rapper P DIDDY. 10Celebs 10 who cite one of the other 262 types of monkey as their favourite type of monkey include Jam frontman PAUL WELLER, WELLER US Vice President MIKE PENCE and freelance ejaculator PETER NORTH.