Some weeks back I was in the beautiful city of my childhood, Brooklyn, USA. (For those of you not in the know Brooklyn was it’s own city until ‘‘the mistake of ’98’’ that is, 1898, when we reluctantly joined with ‘‘New York City;’’ most of us have been lamenting it ever since.) I was visiting my beloved undergraduate alma mater, Brooklyn College, to meet with my friend and the learned Guest Editor of this Special Issue, Professor Alfred Rosenberger. The college’s Georgian architecture is beautiful this time of year and has been used as the setting for many movies. Indeed, I was recently watching Spinning into Butter (Gilman and Atchinson, 2007), a story set in a college in bucolic Vermont, with two of my tax deductions, when one of them noted, ‘‘Gee, that’s a beautiful campus.’’ ‘‘That’s ‘cause it’s Vermont and everything is green and pretty there,’’ added my Ivy League know-it-all. ‘‘Actually,’’ I interrupted, that’s Brooklyn College. ‘‘Sure, Dad,’’ they laughed in unison, ‘‘and the Dodgers are moving back too!’’ ‘‘Want to bet?’’ I gamely responded. ‘‘If I’m right, you clean the garage; if you’re right, new iPhones!’’ They eagerly took up the gauntlet and laughed : : :until the credits rolled with acknowledgements to—you guessed it—Brooklyn College! I really like my clean garage. Upon arrival, I meandered down the verdant pathways to Ingersoll Hall, the main science building. This is where I spent most of my undergrad days, as did scores of other science neophytes, many of whom, like Stanley Cohen (BC’41, 1986 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine) went on to distinguished careers in varied areas of Medicine, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Returning to BC is always poignant for me, for it was here that I cemented both my love for science and began to focus seriously on studying my boyhood fascination with monkeys (see Laitman, 2010). Today’s excursion led me to the laboratory of the above-mentioned Alfie Rosenberger, one of the brightest and most hard working (and often quite controversial) figures in the world of monkeydom. He’s one of the really sharp folks, those that know not only the lumps and bumps of our close brethren, but what they may mean, and how if you tie them all together and look really close you can figure out relationships going back millions of years. His particular love, and the lens through which he views and interprets evolutionary events, are the monkeys of the New World. To put this group in a larger perspective for those who do not spend their hours riveted to our hairy relatives, we are primates, spelled with a capital ‘‘P’’ and pronounced ‘‘pri-MAYtees’’ only when used as the proper noun, such as in the Order Primates. Primates can be further subdivided many ways (anthropologists must make a living!) but a basic breakdown is to separate us into two ‘‘Suborders’’: Strepsirhini (lemurs, lorises, and their ilk) and Haplorhini (monkeys, apes, and us; many include the tarsiers with this group, but I don’t want to get into those arguments here—anthropologists can bite more then the tarsiers!) The Haplorhini are usually subdivided further into two Infraorders, the Catarrhini—Old World monkeys, apes and us (here ‘‘Old World’’ denotes living species from Africa and Asia and macaques from the rocks at Gibraltar, not the villages of eastern Europe as my relatives would think; ancestors of some were in Europe, however); and the Platyrrhini, the New World monkeys (living and extinct monkeys from the Americas; some 16 living genera and greater than two dozen extinct ones.) (By the way, if you are curious as to all the ‘‘ : : : rhini’’ suffixes, it’s due to a focus on nose shapes—Ptatyrrhini means flat nosed—which was the feature centered upon when this classification was suggested by Reginald Pocock in a series of papers back in the early part of the 20th century; see Reviews in Hershkovitz, 1977; Szalay and Delson, 1979). In the world of primates, the New World monkeys are clearly the ‘‘Rodney Dangerfields’’ of our relatives, rarely getting their due respect. Focus has usually been on our evolutionarily closest relatives, the gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans—the ‘‘Great’’ apes (pretty pompous name, if you think about it; the ‘‘Lesser’’ apes, the gibbons and siamangs, have been complaining for years)— or certain groups of Old World monkeys such as baboons or macaques. Those groups get all the television specials and cool people going to live with them; neither Jane Goodall nor Diane Fossey ever cuddled up to New World monkeys. Disrespected as they may be by the general public or primate observer megastars, New World monkeys are adored by the primate cognoscenti as they encompass an incredible, and relatively untapped, world of variation in form, functional anatomy and evolutionary adaptation. How they arrived in the New World has been a source of much discussion and debate, yet they probably came from Africa some 30 million years before the present (look at a map and see how South America fits snugly into the African continent; historically the land masses