Tarsier in a Limestone Forest

Tarsier in a Limestone Forest is an original illustration set in Bohol Island, Philippines. It lies in equatorial latitudes, where the climate is tropical monsoon — a short drier season inside a wet year.

A tiny primate grips a slim vertical branch at dusk, its enormous eyes dominating the head. Humid limestone forest surrounds it, dense and dim, and the remaining light is blue and low.

Why can the tarsier turn its head almost all the way round?

Each eye is larger than the animal's brain and cannot rotate in its socket, so the neck turns almost all the way round instead — an extreme adaptation to hunting insects in near-darkness. Clinging upright to vertical stems and leaping between them is the whole locomotion. It survives only in undisturbed humid tropical forest, and only on a few islands.

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