The Tiny Primate That Was Probably the Inspiration for Yoda

Tarsiers are crap at surprise parties because you can’t tell if they’re actually surprised or not. This is just kinda how they look.

I’m aware that what I’m about to say may well ignite sectarian conflict within the Star Wars fan community, but I’m pretty sure I know what the inspiration for Yoda was. It wasn’t Albert Einstein, as some heretics have claimed. And the inspiration wasn’t the creator of Yoda himself, as the man who created Yoda has claimed. It was a tiny, wide-eyed, positively adorable primate that bounds around the forests of Indonesia and the Philippines and Borneo: the tarsier.

I have that on good authority. One of the world’s foremost experts on the critter, Myron Shekelle, told me so. And he’s trying to confirm as much. “I work closely with a guy who knows Harrison Ford, and Harrison Ford of course knows Lucas, so we’ve been trying to get the actual answer for a while,” he laughed. “But we don’t have it really confirmed.” Check this article again in a year or so, though, and I could well have added an update with good news from Shekelle.

These are trifles, though. The tarsier (of which there are believed to be around 10 species) is surely one of the most remarkable primates around, with its humongous eyes and long padded fingers and general oh-criminy-did-I-leave-the-oven-on appearance. It can rotate its head like an owl. It speaks in ultrasound. It’s the only primate to feed exclusively on meat. And it’s the only primate to jump right into my heart.

So let’s talk about those eyeballs first, shall we? They’re some of the biggest eyes relative to body size in the animal kingdom, and for good reason: The tarsier is a nocturnal hunter. But we primates, we’re not too good at seeing at night. That’s because almost all primates lack the tapetum lucidum, a reflective tissue in the eyes that greatly enhances night vision for nocturnal creatures. Shine a flashlight in a raccoon’s eyes, for instance, and that evil glow you get back is the tapetum lucidum. You and me, we don’t have this. That’s why our night vision kinda sucks.

An incredible shot of a tarsier coming in for the kill. With those super-elongated legs, it can bound 15 feet, landing right on its target.

The tarsier is no exception—well, until it evolved the most glorious peepers a primate could ask for. It took what should be diurnal eyeballs—that is, eyes that only work well in the daytime—and modified them into nocturnal ones, all without the tapetum lucidum layer. “It turns out when you take a diurnal eye and you try and get it to become nocturnal, because it no longer has that layer it has to blow up quite a bit larger in order to collect enough light to really be operative,” said Shekelle.

And boy did they get big. So big, in fact, that the tarsier can’t move them around. But for that it has a solution: It can swivel its noodle almost 360 degrees, Exorcist-style. And with giant eyes and a pivoting noggin, the tarsier is essentially the owl of the rainforest. Two unrelated species arriving at adaptations independently like this is known as convergent evolution—think bats and birds both evolving to fly, one with feathers and the other with a stretchy membrane.

And like an owl, the tarsier is a master nighttime hunter, a menace to creatures like insects and lizards that are under the mistaken impression that the darkness will save them. To target its prey, it uses both its huge eyes and its individually pivoting ears. (Interestingly, around 20 percent of humans can wiggle their ears a little bit because long ago our ancestors could pivot them like tarsiers and cats. If you can do it, that doesn’t mean you’re less evolved. It just means you’re a freak. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) And it can leap perhaps as far as 15 feet—not too shabby for a creature that would fit in the palm of your hand—thanks to the longest legs relative to body size among primates. Tarsiers are in fact named after their highly elongated tarsus, or the group of bones that make up your ankle and upper foot.

A tarsier’s eyes have evolved to be so enormous, it can’t even move them in its head. Which means you can say whatever you want to a tarsier and it can’t roll its eyes at you.

This gives the tarsier a whole lot of spring in its step, bounding from tree to tree like a ricocheting bullet (seriously, check out the video below), landing right on its doomed prey and snagging it with those big hands. Their chompers are really long sharp cones, “so they become like lances, and those are used to just pierce down through the exoskeleton of insects and to deliver one really quick killing bite,” taking care to close its big, beautiful eyes so the struggling prey doesn’t poke them out, said Shekelle. The tarsier is so specialized for this kind of hunting that it doesn’t need to supplement its diet with fruits and veggies like a chimp might, making it the only purely carnivorous primate on Earth.

Also a bit weird for a primate is that some tarsier species don’t seem to be social. Well, all sexually reproducing animals have to be social to some degree so they can get together to mate, so it’d be more accurate to say that they aren’t particularly gregarious, living instead a solitary life. But they have a clever way to find each other and initiate sexy time, all while avoiding detection by their own predators: They can belt out tunes that are far too high-pitched for other creatures to pick up.

It seems the scientists who discovered this had noticed that tarsiers will often stare around with their mouths agape, as if they’re about to scream. Yet nothing comes out. So on a hunch the researchers pointed a device normally used to detect bat echolocation at the tarsiers. And sure enough, the tiny creatures are babbling in frequencies far outside of what our own ears can detect, a unique trait among primates. Being able to hear such noises could also allow them to pick up the ultrasonic calls of their prey, while another hypothesis “is that they basically have a silent alarm that the other animals can’t hear,” said Shekelle.

So we then should ask: If a tarsier screams in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Trouble for the Tarsiers

Sadly, this remarkable strategy does them little good against their greatest enemy: us. Tarsiers are in serious trouble. Deforestation, overhunting, presticides, you name it. The crummy things we’re doing to this planet are hitting the tarsiers hard.

Shekelle has spent years campaigning for the tarsier, making the rounds in its habitats in Southeast Asia to educate locals on conservation. Perhaps the most ironic problem seems to be its villainization as an agricultural pest. “So one of the things that I’ve done is try to work with [farmers] and explain: No no, tarsiers are actually interesting. They’re the only primate that doesn’t eat any plant matter, none at all,” said Shekelle. “If you see them in your crops, they’re eating insects that eat the leaves on your crops, so they’re actually good.”

His advice isn’t always heeded, though. “One very memorable time, after we did this and the people were like, ‘Yeah, yeah that’s very interesting,’ we came back the next day and the guy had cut down his own fruit tree that had the tarsier nest in it. Clearly he didn’t believe a word that we said.”

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