Gray Langurs or Hanuman Langurs

[Govinda]

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Gray langurs or Hanuman langurs, the most widespread langurs of South Asia, are a group of Old World monkeys constituting the entirety of the genus Semnopithecus.

Gray langurs are large and fairly terrestrial, inhabiting forest, open lightly wooded habitats, and urban areas on the Indian subcontinent. Most species are found at low to moderate altitudes, but the Nepal gray langur and Kashmir gray langur occur up to 4,000 metres (13,000 ft) in the Himalayas.[SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][6]

[/SUP]Characteristics

These langurs are largely gray (some more yellowish), with a black face and ears. Externally, the various species mainly differ in the darkness of the hands and feet, the overall color and the presence or absence of a crest.[SUP][2][/SUP][SUP][3][/SUP] There are also significant variations in the size depending on the sex, with the male always larger than the female. The head-and-body length is from 51 to 79 cm (20 to 31 in). Their tails, at 69 to 102 cm (27 to 40 in) are always longer than their bodies.[SUP][7][/SUP] Langurs from the southern part of their range are smaller than those from the north. At 26.5 kg (58 lb), the heaviest langur ever recorded was a male Nepal gray langur.[SUP][3][/SUP] The larger gray langurs are rivals for the largest species of monkey found in Asia. The average weight of gray langurs is 18 kg (40 lb) in the males and 11 kg (24 lb) in the females.[SUP][7][/SUP]
Langurs mostly walk quadrupedally and spend half their time on and the ground and the other half in the trees. They will also make bipedal hops, climbing and descending supports with the body upright, and leaps. Langurs can leap 3.7–4.6 m (12.0–15.0 ft) horizontally and 10.7–12.2 m (35–40 ft) in descending.[SUP][8][/SUP]



Among the seven species of Semnopithecus recognized in Mammal Species of the World are:[SUP][1][/SUP]

• Tufted gray langur Semnopithecus priam [is found in south east india and Sri-lanka]

Most interesting thing:

They use different sounds for different situations.
Vocalizations

Gray langurs are recorded to make a number of vocalizations.[SUP][42][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP]

• loud calls or whoops made only by adult males during displays;
• harsh barks made by adult and subadult males when surprised by a predator;
• cough barks made by adults and subadults during group movements;
• grunt barks made mostly by adult males during group movements and agonistic interactions;
• rumble screams made in agonistic interactions;
• pant barks made with loud calls when groups are interacting;
• grunts made in many different situations, usually in agonistic ones;
• honks made by adult males when groups are interacting
• rumbles made during approaches, embraces, and mounts;
• hiccups made by most members of a group when they find another group.

Gray langur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[sarang]

Hanumanji visits Rama katha

[video=youtube;CYi60Ss4YQE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYi60Ss4YQE[/video]

 

[prasad1]

Is it right to perpetuate a mythe? Was Hanuman a Monkey?
Vanara are Forrest people, Just as Naga people of Nagaland, they are not snakes.

Swami Vivekanand - one of the great teachers of religion said ‘An atheist or non-believer stands better chances of God realization than those who swallow any nonsense in the name of God’; because a non-believer accepts only rationally true scientific facts.

Vanaras lived in a settlement named Kishkindha. It was a town with neatly laid roads and orderly streets with a number of houses on both sides of the streets. Kishkindha was protected by a fortress. They even had a king and ministers to guide the king in the affairs of the colony. The king lived in a palace having a number of rooms. Vanaras had a construction engineer by the name Nal, an expert in the art of healing called Sushen, and experts who could judge the weather. All this goes to show that Vanaras were not Rhesus Monkeys as popularly believed but were Stone-Age people.

Folklores the world over, do mention Stone Age people as giants. Much later written Mahabharata too mentions a giant who’d call on a village at regular intervals and demand food. Bhim, who was living incognito in a village, obliged the villagers by killing the giant. Giants were held in fear and treated with contempt. So they were forced to live in seclusion, hidden from the humans. After their prominent role in the war with Lanka, the Indians began to treat Va naras respectfully. In the interaction with humans perhaps Vanaras mutated or maybe they became extinct.





But Valmiki describes Vanaras having a tail!





Valmiki himself answers to that. In the opening chapters of Ramayana he confesses that being a commoner and a shudra, he never had a chance to meet or see any of the characters of the epic before he finished writing it. He wrote Ramayana exclusively from what he heard from the divine messenger Narad. The descriptions were fairly detailed to which Valmiki had to add his poetic imagination to make the epic interesting.





Colloquial Sanskrit calls the monkeys Vanara. Gorillas and Chimpanzees are not found in India. So when Narad mentioned the Stone Age men as Va nara (creatures closely resembling humans) Valmiki thought that Narad was talking of a kind of monkeys. Therefore when it came to describe Va Naras, Valmiki described them as human like creatures and gave them a tail.