First tool-use by an animal to hunt a land vertebrate

The first scientifically confirmed example of animals using tools to hunt land vertebrates (higher terrestrial back-boned animals) involved female and immature chimpanzees Pan troglodytes within a chimp population inhabiting the Fongoli area of southeast Senegal, western Africa. Using sticks averaging 63 cm long that they have sharpened with their teeth, these chimps use them as spears to stab inside tree hollows where nocturnal lemur-like primates called bushbabies are sleeping, skewering and thus killing the bushbabies, which the chimps then eat.

Adult male chimps in this population kill and eat green monkeys but claim precedence over their kills, so the team of scientists who have documented this new case of tool-using in chimps believe that it has arisen among the population's female and immature chimps as a covert means of obtaining food for themselves that won’t be claimed by the adult males, as they do not seem interested in eating bushbabies.