Capuchin monkeys discovered feeding infants in rare cases of cannibalism

By Joshua Rapp Learning

White-headed capuchin monkeys usually eat fruit

JamesTung / Getty Images

Capuchin monkeys have been observed to eat the remains of a young Capuchin child, an extremely rare example of cannibalism among primates living on the American continent.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” says Katharine Jack of Tulane University in Louisiana.

Since 1983, researchers have been observing and collecting data on white-faced capuchins in Costa Rica’s Santa Rosa National Park – one of the longest-running studies of primates in the world.

In April 2019, Mari Nishikawa of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and other researchers observed …