Monkeys were very much in the news in 2010. In March, the Monitor reported that the Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay, a fugitive rhesus macaque that had been eluding animal control officers had more than 31,000 friends on Facebook. Now it has over 80,000.
In July, security guards at Mexico's Benito Juarez International Airport, detained a man after discovering that he had stuffed 18 live Peruvian titi monkeys into his girdle, in an attempt to sell them on the black market for more than $1,000 apiece.
That same month, the Chinese People's Daily reported that Taliban insurgents were training Kalashnikov-armed macaques and baboons to shoot at US troops, a report that primatologists say is almost certainly false.
We also learned this year that monkeys and humans may be more closely related than previously thought, that monkeys hate flying squirrels, according to monkey-annoyance experts, and of the existence of a new species of Burmese monkey with an upside nose that can't stop sneezing when it rains.
What we learned: It might take an infinite number of monkeys to type the complete works of Shakespeare, but it takes only one to make headlines.
