'Shearling coat' clad monkey on loose in IKEA's parking lot in Toronto goes viral on Twitter

An incident involving a monkey going loose in the parking lot of IKEA home furnishings store in Toronto has gone viral on micro-blogging site Twitter.

Customers were surprised to find a 7-month-old rhesus macaque monkey, clad in a pint-sized shearling coat, wandering around the store's parking lot on Dec. 9, 2012.

The baby monkey, named Darwin, made its way through rows of parked cars and ended up outside a set of store doors, CBS News reports.

According to the report, Ikea staff lured the primate into a corner before calling police, who contacted the city's Animal Services department.

"It was just outside the store, just in a corner area where the monkey had nowhere to go, but it was pretty scared," an official said. He said the monkey had escaped its crate in a parked car.

Word of the incident sparked a flurry of comments and photos on Twitter, as well as two parody Twitter accounts which took on the persona of the wandering monkey, the report said.

The #IkeaMonkey hashtag garnered over 2,300 tweets on Monday, according to the social metrics site Topsy.com. The primate has also inspired several jokes and spinoffs in Twitter and Instagram, the report added.