Wow! Cercopithecidae a HUGE primate family! It includes almost all Old World Monkeys. If you need a refresher on what “Old World” means, it means that these monkeys are basically from anywhere that is not South America. Now I did oscillate between splitting this into it’s subfamilies, as some people recognize them as different families, but in the end I decided to put colobinae under cercopithecidae.

I am not going to be able to sit here and list every single species of cercopithecidae because we would be here all night! But to give you a good idea of who belongs to the cercopithecidae family we’ll get a few examples: Baboons, macaques, colobus monkeys, proboscis monkeys, leaf monkeys, vervets and langurs.

These species are wide-spread all throughout Africa and Asia, and in fact the only known primate to reside in Europe is from the cercopithecidae family. That’s right! There are free-roaming barbary macaques living in Gibraltar, Spain. Pretty cool, huh?

Cercopithecidae is full of fun variations, bright colors, and some down-right odd looking primates. Particularly the mandrill and proboscis monkey. Both of these species are not only known for having some pretty crazy noses, but their brightly color genitals will definitely draw your attention.

Almost all members of the cercopithecidae family have tails, tend to live in larger matrilineal groups (which means the males leave the group to find new groups while the females stay put), and are mainly omnivorous.