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Researchers have iden­ti­fied a new species of African mon­key, locally known as the Lesula, described in the Sep­tem­ber 12 issue of the open access jour­nal PLOS ONE. This is only the sec­ond new species of African mon­key dis­cov­ered in the last 28 years. The other was the Kipunji (Rung­we­ce­bus kipunji) in Tan­za­nia, in 2005, and cur­rently listed as Crit­i­cally Endangered

The first Lesula mon­key (Cer­co­p­ithe­cus lomamien­sis sp) found was a young cap­tive ani­mal seen in 2007 in a school director’s com­pound in the town of Opala in the Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of Congo (DRC). The young mon­key bore a resem­blance to the owl-​faced mon­key (Cer­co­p­ithe­cus ham­lyni), but its coloura­tion was unlike that of any other known species.

Over the fol­low­ing three years, the study authors located addi­tional Lesula in the wild, deter­mined its genetic and anatom­i­cal dis­tinc­tive­ness, and made ini­tial obser­va­tions of its behav­iour and ecol­ogy, as reported in the PLOS ONE paper. The study was per­formed as part of a con­ser­va­tion project, called TL2, in DRC.

The new species’ range cov­ers about 6,500 square miles in cen­tral DRC, in what was one of Congo’s last bio­log­i­cally unex­plored for­est blocks. Although its range is remote and only lightly set­tled at present, the Lesula is threat­ened by local bush meat hunting.

Please read the arti­cle of Jeremy Hance at Mongabay​.com for more detailed infor­ma­tion about these new findings.

The above news item is reprinted from mate­ri­als avail­able at PLOS ONE via EurekAlert. Orig­i­nal text may be edited for con­tent and length.

(Source: EurekAlert, 12.09.2012; PLOS ONE, 13.09.2012; Mongabay, 12.09.2012)