Guinea baboon

The Guinea baboon (Papio papio) is a baboon from the Old World monkey family and one of the smallest baboon species, weighing between 13 and 26 kilograms. Its range in West Africa includes Guinea, Senegal, Gambia, southern Mauritania and western Mali, where it lives in dry forests, gallery forests and woodland savanna and gathers seasonally near permanent water. It is diurnal and terrestrial but sleeps in trees or on high rocks at night, and the number of suitable sleeping trees limits group size. Like other baboons it is an opportunistic omnivore, eating fruit, buds, roots, bark, grasses, seeds, tubers, insects, birds and small mammals. Unusually for an Old World monkey, Guinea baboons share food. Because of its small range and the loss of its habitat, the IUCN classifies the species as near threatened.