A Monkey That Wears A Cap

In the jungles of Northeast India lives a brilliantly coloured primate that wears a cap on its head. Meet the capped langur, also known as the capped monkey, capped leaf monkey or bonneted langur.

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This isn’t a story about some naughty, cap-stealing monkey. The cap belongs to the monkey and the monkey is known for its cap.

Trachypithecus pileatus, commonly known as the capped langur, has a very distinctive tuft of hair on its head, from which it gets its name. There are four known subspecies of the capped langur, with small differences in the shape of their ‘caps’ and in the colour of the fur on their bellies and faces. But they all have these characteristic tufts of hair, grey fur on their backs, and very long tails (longer than the length of the head and body) that are darker towards the tip.