A Trip to Bohol in Quest of Tarsius *

I. EVOLUTIONARY POSITION OF Tarsius The primates as a group have been variously classified since 1735, when they were set apart by Linneaus as the first order of the great phylum of vertebrates (See Appendix below). At present three major suborders of primates are recognized (See Zuckerman, 1933, p. 17): (i) TARSIOIDEA, (ii) LEMUROIDEA, and (iii) PITHECOIDEA. The first and probably the oldest phylogen-etically is now represented by a single genus known to systematists as Tarsius Storr, recognized in 1780 just after the death of Linnaeus (See Fig. 1). The LEMUROIDEA, which has subordinal recognition along with the TARSIOIDEA, is a large group, thought by some to be more "primitive" than the tarsioids.t Actually the existing lemuroids represent a wide offshoot from the parent stem (Le Gros Clark, 1934) and there is much to support the belief that the tarsioids are nearer the stem from which all primates have sprung than are the lemurs (Gregory, 1934, Gregory and McGregor, 1937). The third great suborder of PITHECOIDEA (Pocock, 1918) includes Old and New World monkeys, anthropoids, apes and man. One can not here describe this huge division of the primates since it includes too many diverse forms far remote from the cost of purchase and transportation of the two living spectral tarsiers mentioned at the end of this paper was defrayed by an emergency grant from the t Many authorities rank the LEMUROIDEA as Suborder I and TARSIOIDEA as Suborder II of ORDER PRIMATA. This seems scarcely logical if the tarsiers are nearer the pithecoid stem than existing lemuroids as well as being older phylo