New Monkey one of a kind

[vincent]

Thanks to WishX for the heads up on this article, :yes:

To experts, new monkey is one of a kind

A tiny skull brought to the Field Museum helps lead to a wild find: It belongs to a tree-dwelling African primate that is in a genus all its own

Sent to Chicago for analysis, the remains of a little thief killed by a Tanzanian farmer's trap in August have turned out to be something quite extraordinary: the first new, living genus of African primates to be discovered since 1923.

Scientists have intensively tracked and studied African primates in the wild for more than a century, which makes the discovery slightly shocking to biologists. Indeed, some skeptics have already begun to challenge the findings.

"The fact that we found a new primate genus illustrates that we still have a lot to learn about the world around us," said Bill Stanley, mammal collection manager at the Field Museum, where the carcass of the surprising monkey is now stored.

Stanley is one of seven co-authors to introduce the new genus in an article published online Thursday by the research journal Science, saying a new classification was required because the specimen looks like a mangabey monkey but is genetically closer to a baboon. A tree dweller, the monkey is about 3 feet long with a prominent crest of hair and bushy whiskers.

In scientific classification, genus is a broader category than species. The Latin name of the familiar milk cow, for example, is Bos taurus. The species taurus is grouped with all wild and domestic cattle, including oxen and yaks, in the Bos genus. That genus, in turn, belongs to the Bovidae family, an even larger group that includes goats, sheep, bison, wildebeests and gazelles.

The authors call the new primate genus Rungwecebus (rhung-way-CEE-bus), because the creature's main natural habitat is the forests on Mt. Rungwe in Tanzania. The monkey's full name is Rungwecebus kipunji (key-POON-gee), after the name locals use for it.

Thursday's article is not the first Science has published about the animal. Last May 20, seven authors introduced the rare, highly evasive creature as a newly discovered species of mangabey, naming it Lophocebus kipunji.

The article was based on the only evidence available at the time, photographs taken in 2004 by field biologists working in two remote Tanzanian mountain forests: Rungwe and Udzungwa.

The new monkey might still be considered a mangabey were it not for an old farmer on Mt. Rungwe who was being plagued by wild critters raiding his cornfields. He set out traps, and on the morning of Aug. 3, he found a dead young monkey in one of them, its mouth full of corn.

The farmer knew scientists working for New York's Wildlife Conservation Society were in the area and were extremely interested in this particular kind of monkey, and the word went out. The scientists, Tim Davenport and three colleagues who all were among the co-authors of the 2005 article, had the carcass within hours.

At the time, Stanley of the Field Museum was on an island off Tanzania's coast, tramping through a forest in search of rats and bats. One evening, he said, he was standing on a beach admiring the sunset over the Indian Ocean when he got a text message from Davenport saying he had obtained a dead kipunji monkey.

"What do I do now?" Davenport asked.

"The connections out there were abysmal," said Stanley, "and it took me nearly the whole night to get a text message back to them to freeze the carcass and wait for my arrival. Then it took me two weeks to get off the island and across Tanzania to the frozen carcass."

Stanley and the four other scientists sent tissue samples to a university in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and to geneticist Link Olson, mammals curator at the University of Alaska Museum. Stanley returned to Chicago with most of the carcass, including the skull.

Molecular analysis of the tissues by Olson, who did his doctoral and postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, yielded some surprises. The genetic traits it showed at the molecular level were all strongly associated with baboons.

"Had someone just sent me the tissue and hadn't told me what it was," Olson said, "I would have said they had discovered a new baboon."

Its skeleton, however, looked nothing like a baboon's. Stanley next asked Eric Sargis, a Yale University primatologist, to come to the Field Museum and help him analyze the skeleton in comparison with the museum's collection of more than 5,000 primate specimens, one of the world's largest.

"Its skull is very different from a baboon skull," said Sargis, who grew up in suburban Bloomingdale and Geneva, graduated from Northern Illinois University and did his doctoral work at City University of New York.

"From its morphology it can't be a baboon, but genetically it can't be a mangabey monkey," Sargis said.

Field studies of its vocalizations showed its "honk bark was somewhat akin to the roar grunt of a baboon" but unlike the "whoop gobble" of a mangabey, he said. "It wasn't a Lophocebus [a mangabey], but it wasn't a baboon, so we had no choice but to put it into its own category," Stanley said.

The evidence suggests, he added, that the new monkey genus evolved from a baboon ancestor.

News of the new monkey genus is getting mixed reactions from other biologists around the world.

Jonathan Kingdon, an Oxford University biological anthropologist and authority on primate and human evolution, enthusiastically praised the article in an e-mail, saying the new genus is a rare find that is of interest to more than just primatologists.

"All these topics are equally important for reconstructing the course of human evolution," he wrote.

It is generally thought, he said, that "baboons, like people, somehow became more `advanced' by coming down out of the trees! Yet here is evidence that `successful' ground dwellers, in the right circumstances, can give rise to `less successful' arboreal monkeys."

But Colin Groves, a renowned expert in primate taxonomy at Australian National University in Canberra, e-mailed to say he is less convinced by the Science article.

"Looking at their DNA phylogenetic trees, there are so many features of them that simply do not agree with the phylogenies published by other authors, all of them agreeing with each other, that I wonder if something has gone wrong," he wrote.

Groves suggested the authors should review their analyses, hinting he believes the original article on the monkey that described it as a mangabey may be closer to the truth. "It is certainly interesting to know whether kipunji is a baboon or an arboreal mangabey," he said, "but it may not involve a new genus."

The irony is that the monkey, so reclusive in nature that it remained unknown to science until recently, is so threatened by loss of habitat as humans move into its mountain redoubts that it may become extinct in the next few years.

Source: Chicago Tribune

[Fred Derf Veteran]

Let's keep them as pets, teach them to talk so they can become servants then they can take over the earth and Charlton Heston can come and save the remaining humans who, by that point, have lost the ability to speak and don't seem to bathe very often either.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

This is pretty cool, and who could have guessed it would be killed (like the Grizzly/Polar bear hybrid, which was killed)

Let's keep them as pets, teach them to talk so they can become servants then they can take over the earth and Charlton Heston can come and save the remaining humans who, by that point, have lost the ability to speak and don't seem to bathe very often either.

Those damn dirty apes!