List of Endangered New World Monkeys

There are 141 species of new world monkeys, of which the 33 species in the lists below are classified as endangered. New world monkeys are the ones that live wild in Mexico, Central America and South America.

For some types of monkeys almost all species are endangered. For instance, six out of seven species of spider monkeys are endangered, as are three of the four species of bearded sakis. Also endangered are all four species of Brazil's lion tamarins.

Determinations of whether monkeys are endangered come from the World Conservation Union (IUCN), which maintains the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The organization is an internationally recognized authority on the status of species around the world.

The Red List uses categories to indicate how severely endangered an animal species is. Monkeys get placed into categories of "Critically Endangered" and "Endangered" based on how rapidly their population has declined, how small an area they now occupy, how many individuals remain, or the likelihood they'll soon become extinct.

Besides the monkeys listed here, the Red List assigns to the "Vulnerable" category another 25 new world species which have dropped in numbers, but less drastically than the endangered species. The three categories together make up the "Threatened" species. In total, 58 species (41 percent) of new world monkeys are threatened.

Critically Endangered Monkeys in Central and South America

The dozen critically endangered species listed below are the new world monkeys that now live closest to the brink of becoming extinct in the wild. They have either:

Endangered Monkeys in Mexico, Central America and South America

Endangered monkeys are not as bad off as those that are critically endangered, but they still have come alarmingly close to extinction. These 21 new world monkeys have either: