The golden-headed lion tamarin weighs about 13.5-25 oz. when it's full grown, and it's 8-14 inches when it's full grown. Its tail length is an astonishing 12.5-16 inches, which is more than its whole body. It lives about 10-12 years out in the wild, but it will live up to 23 in captivity because it usually cannot find enough food for its diet.
The golden-headed lion tamarin is found in only one place in the world, Brazil. It lives in Brazil, in coastal lowland rain forests. When it comes to eating, the golden-headed lion tamarin is omnivorous. This means that it will eat anything in sight that is smaller than itself and that will taste good.
A nickname for the golden-headed lion tamarin is King of the Rain Forest. The name comes from its golden mane which looks exactly like a lion's mane and lions are king of the jungle, so they call the golden-headed lion tamarins, King of the Rain Forests. The golden-headed lion tamarin's hair looks and feels like black silk, but its face is bald with no hair, and to make up for that it has a huge golden orange mane. Some parts of the golden-headed lion tamarins' body, like its arms and elbows and its feet, are golden orange as well.
In the 1980's almost half of the population of wild golden-headed tamarins were shipped out from South America for the European pet trade, but unfortunately 60% of them didn't survive the shipping to the European pet trade. Fortunately enough, about 20 golden-headed lion tamarins were saved and taken to the Belgium government to be bred in Belgium. Even better yet, Japan saved about 13 golden-headed lion tamarins. They were brought back to the Brazilian government but sadly enough, there were not people smart enough to take care of the animals and breed them. As a result, they couldn't bring them back to Brazil's rain forests so the Brazilian government sent the golden-headed lion tamarins to different zoos in North America that have had a lot of progress in breeding golden-headed lion tamarins.
The Brazilian government seems to have done the right thing, because North America has made a lot of progress with the golden-headed lion tamarins, and most of them are ready to be sent back into the rain forests.