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August 30, 2015

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Nuts about finding new species

FOR nearly a century the carcass of a small, reddish-brown monkey from South America gathered dust in a windowless backroom of the American Natural History Museum in New York City.

Like a morgue corpse in a drawer with the wrong toe tag, it was a victim of mistaken identity. No one realized during all those years that it was, in fact, a specimen of an unknown species.

That taxonomical injustice will be rectified at the end of this month when the newly-minted Latin name of the overlooked monkey — rediscovered in 2013 during a jungle expedition through central Peru mounted by a Dutch primatologist — is officially published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal “Primate Conservation”.

Then and only then, according to the rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, will Callicebus urubambensis, named for the river along which it lives, finally exist in the annals of biology.

Pretty big deal

The discovery of new primates, especially monkeys, is a pretty big deal.

“Several of those are titis,” said Jan Vermeer, a member of Primate Specialist Group and the man whose five-year quest brought C. urubambensis out from the forest canopy shadows.

Smaller than a domestic cat, titis mainly eat fruit, mate for life, and are known to adopt the infants of other couples when survival is at stake.

Males generally take charge of raising the young, handing them off to females for nursing.

Vermeer, who is also the zoological director of a wildlife park in France, long suspected that there were additional species in the jungles of south central Peru apart from C. brunneus, named for its darker brown color, and another monkey called Toppin’s Titi.

As part of his search for new species, Vermeer paid a visit to the American Natural History Museum to peruse the monkeys in its collection. One labelled as a C. brunneus caught his eye.

“When I saw the specimen at the museum in New York in 2008, I began to have doubts,” he said. “It didn’t quite look like what I expected.”

He launched his search on the web. When he noticed some from the region in question were also slightly reddish, like the one in the museum, he knew what he had to do.

His first expedition in 2009 ­— undertaken with Peruvian conservationists from the NGO Proyecto Mono Tocon ­— was more for reconnaissance.

In 2013, Vermeer returned again with Julio Tello-Alvarado, the NGO’s head of research.

A lucky encounter with a hunter who had just bagged one of these mystery monkeys allowed the scientists to confirm their hunch: they had, indeed, found a new species.

“If we want to protect our nature in Peru, we first need to know what lives in the country,” said Tello-Alvarado.




 

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