Patas monkey

The common patas monkey (Erythrocebus patas), also called the hussar monkey, is a ground-dwelling monkey of the semi-arid country of West Africa that also reaches into East Africa. It is long-legged and built for running across open ground, and shows a high degree of sexual dimorphism: adult males average about 12.4 kilograms and adult females about 6.5 kilograms. Males have the longest canine teeth of all the African long-tailed monkeys, and canine size helps establish a pecking order among them. The diet of insects, gum, seeds and tubers is more typical of much smaller primates. Outside the roughly one-month mating season, patas troops are usually a single adult male with several females, and conflict rates vary with how clumped the food is. Wild patas monkeys live up to about 20 years. Taxonomists have debated whether the species belongs in its own genus or within Cercopithecus.