Capuchin monkeys spotted eating infant in rare act of cannibalism

By Joshua Rapp Learn

Capuchin monkeys have been observed eating the remains of a young capuchin infant, offering an extremely rare example of cannibalism among the primates that live in the Americas.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” says Katharine Jack at Tulane University in Louisiana.

Researchers have been observing and collecting data on white-faced capuchins in the Santa Rosa National Park in Costa Rica since 1983 – one of the longest ongoing studies on primates in the world.

In April 2019, Mari Nishikawa from the University of Tokyo, Japan, and other researchers were observing …