Simiiformes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A suborder of primates including monkeys, apes, and humans, characterized by their flat face and forward-facing eyes
2. Members of this group typically exhibit highly social behaviors and significant cognitive abilities
3. This classification encompasses both New World and Old World species that share common ancestral traits in their evolutionary lineage

Etymology: "Simiiformes" combines the Latin "simia," meaning ape, with "-formes," the standard zoological ending for order and group names, from Latin "forma," shape. Read literally, it means "ape-shaped" things. Ancient Romans had "simia" but no such grouping, so the name is a modern scientific coinage built from classical parts. In current taxonomy, the name labels a large branch of the higher primates, the anthropoids, which includes monkeys, apes, and humans. The label is a clade, a group defined by common descent rather than by a shared shape. Its members split into New World monkeys and Old World monkeys, with apes and humans among the latter, and that divergence is generally dated to roughly 30 to 40 million years ago. The name therefore spans two lineages that have been separate for a very long time.