Speculative Apes of April: Insect

In a timeline similar but not identical to our own, woodpeckers never evolved. Nature, however, abhors a vacuum, and their niche was taken instead by a lineage of small, highly derived apes. Known as Picudactylids, they diverged from stem-apes in the early Miocene, and adopted a very specialized lifestyle. Their incisor teeth now protrude from their mouths, like an exaggerated version of the teeth of rodents. Also like rodents, their teeth are used to gnaw-- in this case, at wood and tree bark. They feed almost exclusively on wood-boring insects such as beetle grubs and termites, and have evolved a bizarre way of catching them, with only a single parallel in our timeline, that being the aye-aye. Their thumbs are grotesquely elongated, and are used to reach into dead wood and pry out insect prey, in the manner of a woodpecker's tongue. Like many other apes, however, they also have a fondness for sweet foods, and they satisfy this craving with tree sap, slicing open tree bark with their teeth and licking up the flowing sap. 

The largest member of this group is Picudactylus acudens, which grows to be about the size of an opossum. As a whole, these apes are small compared their relatives, but they are also extremely widespread. Settling into a lucrative ecological niche, they have spread far outside Asia, where they originated, and are now found in Africa, Europe, and have even made it into North America. Picudactylids differ from their avian counterparts in that they are not cavity-nesters. They make "beds" to sleep in every night out of twigs, much as hominids do, and the young are born in these as well. Usually only a single baby is born; twins are extremely rare. Unlike hominids, picudactylids are not particularly social, and it is rare to see more than two in the same place at one time.