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‘Pepper’, a 5-month-old female northern white-cheeked gibbon (Nomascus leucogenys). The many species of gibbon are small, tree-living apes from southeast Asia, most of them listed as ‘endangered’ or ‘critically endangered’ on the IUCN Red List. In their presentation of the N. leucogenys genome, Lucia Carbone and colleagues provide intriguing insights into the biology and evolutionary history of a group that straddles the divide between Old World monkeys and the great apes. The authors investigate how a novel gibbon-specific retrotransposon might be the source of gibbons’ genome plasticity. Rapid karyotype evolution combined with multiple episodes of climate and environmental change might explain the almost instantaneous divergence of the four gibbon genera. Positive selection on genes involved in forelimb development and connective tissue might have been related to gibbons’ unique mode of locomotion in the tropical canopy. Cover: Gabriella Skollar, July 2011 at The Gibbon Conservation Center in Santa Clarita, CA. t# r4 W3 \1 `, w# T8 s" O. w6 i
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