A monkey with striking pinkish-orange lips and a black face, living in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been confirmed as a new species to science. Conservationists first photographed the unusual animal in 2008 — a single blurry image — but it took more than a decade of follow-up work to prove it was genuinely distinct.
The primate was found high in the canopy of the dense tropical forests of Lomami National Park, in the east-central part of the country. After a second sighting about ten years after the first, an international team set out to track, record and genetically analyze the animal. Their findings, published in the journal PLOS One, establish it as a previously unknown species.
This is only the fifth African monkey species to be formally described in the last 75 years — a reminder of how little we still know about the continent's biodiversity, even in the twenty-first century. Junior Amboko, a PhD student at Florida Atlantic University, led the search using audio recordings, photography and detailed genetic studies. He told BBC News it was an "amazing feeling" to look into the face of an animal so few people knew existed.
In this context, "discovering" a species means officially recording and confirming that it has evolved to be genetically distinct — not that no human had ever seen it. Local people already knew the monkey and call it by a common name, Likweli. The primates are described as shy and tend to stay hidden high in the trees, which is part of why science took so long to catch up.
Knowledge takeaway: a black-furred, orange-lipped monkey from DR Congo's Lomami National Park has been confirmed as a new species via genetics and field study; it is only the fifth African monkey described in 75 years, underscoring how much tropical biodiversity remains undocumented even where local communities already know the animal.