In Congo, a rare find -- a new species of monkey

Researchers affiliated with Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History have published the first detailed scientific account of a recently discovered monkey species living in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is only the second new species of African monkey discovered since the mid-1980s. The slender, medium-sized primate - called a Lesula (luh-SOO-la) and roughly similar to a vervet monkey - represents a rare discovery of a previously undocumented mammal, and helps establish the sparsely settled central Congo as an important source of biodiversity, researchers said. They describe the animal in detail in the Sept. 12 issue of the journal PLOS ONE. "This was a totally unexpected find, and we knew we had something unusual and possibly unknown when we first saw the animal. But it was not until we had the genetic and morphological analyses of our collaborating team that we knew we really had a new species," said John and Terese Hart, conservation biologists with the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation and curatorial affiliates of the Peabody.