Aotinae Elliot, 1913

Voss, Robert S. & Fleck, David W., 2011, Mammalian Diversity And Matses Ethnomammalogy In Amazonian Peru Part 1: Primates, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (351), pp. 1-81 : 25

Subfamily Aotinae Elliot, 1913

Night (or owl) monkeys comprise eight currently recognized species in a single genus ( Aotus ) that ranges from Panama to northern Argentina ( Groves, 2005). Seldom seen by day, and hard to see at night due to their weak eyeshine, night monkeys are more frequently detected by their distinctive vocalizations. Unfortunately, the taxonomy of night monkeys has never been comprehensively revised, and many questions of identification remain. In the absence of reliable criteria for field identification, night monkey identifications are usually justified by making assumptions about geographic range limits. Our attempt to identify collected specimens of night monkeys from the Yavarí-Ucayali interfluve, however, suggests that the current taxonomy is itself based on inadequately documented distributional assumptions.