Picture of the day: Miller’s grizzled langur. The monkey was accidentally rediscovered by Simon Fraser University PhD student Brent Loken. The images of this rare monkey are valuable to science – as the only description of the langur came from museum specimens. Credit: Simon Fraser University Public Affairs and Media Relations.

Brent Loken had actually hoped to shoot a photo of the Bornean clouded leopard with his rainforest camera trap, set up close to a mineral lick in the Weahea Forest (38,000 ha rainforest remaining) on East Borneo.

Instead he got a primate – Miller’s grizzled langur, thought to be extinct or on the verge of extinction [usually an equally anonymous position]. When Loken and colleagues returned to the site they could track a family and take more pictures. The Weahea Forest did not lie within the supposed natural range of the rare monkey.

The rediscovery of Miller’s grizzled langur features in the upcoming edition of the American Journal of Primatology.

The Borneo rainforest

Borneo has lost 65 percent of its rainforest, largely due to palm oil plantations and coal mines. Somewhere in the most remote northern [so Malaysian, not Indonesian] stretches of this rainforest there are thought to still be isolated populations of the Sumatran Rhinoceros, an Asian relative of the now-extinct Vietnamese rhino – but also threatened in its survival as both deforestation and poaching continue.

A couple of Miller’s grizzled langurs posing for a monkey family shot in the trees of an East Borneo rainforest. And if you’d like another positive note at the end of your read, here’s a nice picture of one more bit of recently rediscovered biodiversity – one that humms and pollinates.

© Rolf Schuttenhelm | www.bitsofscience.org