Category Archives: Mystery monkeys

Eight Months in the Forest Canopy

To be exact: Eight months spent watching a single forked branch, 17 meters (56 feet) above the ground in the Congo’s Lomami National Park. The aerial roots is usually all we see of an Uapaca tree. The slash confirmed its identification. My name is Daniel Alempijevic, a graduate student from Kate Detwiler’s Primatology lab at […]

Two Red Colobus-Two Sides of the Lomami River

Handsome, seemingly pensive, red colobus on the west bank of the Lomami River, Piliocolobus tholloni. Red Colobus are among the most beautiful – and difficult — of primates. Their cloaks of red, black and white enchant, but are elusive. Until now, this did not matter in the Lomami National Park. We had only one “sort” of […]

Searching from Forest Duff to Forest Canopy for a Critically Endangered Monkey

We had no idea that the critically endangered dryas monkey, existed in the TL2 watersheds until, in 2014, Henri saw a hunter’s kill hung for sale near our Bafundo camp, in the Balanga village of Bafundo. He knew the monkey was different from any he had seen before. John suspected it was the dryas monkey, […]

Monkeys of the Lomami National Park

New species, Cecopithecus lomamiensis, locally known as Lesula, detected during the first exploration of the Lomami forests. When we set out on the first explorations in 2007 we expected to find 9 species of primates in the 30,000 km2 that we called the TL2, an area or landscape of central Congo that includes the middle-Lomami […]