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Colobus congoensis lives in the Congo Basin rainforest. It has black hair and orange-cream lips (it's this that makes it stand out, if anything). It also has high cheekbones and sticky-out ears with distinctive notches. And now it's officially a new species. The discovery was formally published in the journal PLOS One on 15 July 2026, following almost two decades of detective work by primatologists. It is only the fifth new African monkey species to be recognised in the past 75 years.

The monkey was first photographed in 2008 in the remote forests of Lomami National Park, but the image was too indistinct to prove it was anything new. A second sighting in 2018 prompted a dedicated four-year study, during which researchers recorded 114 sightings, analysed its DNA, anatomy and distinctive roaring calls, and confirmed that it had been evolving separately from its closest relatives for millions of years.

And its closest relative? Well, it isn't particularly close geographically. Genetic evidence suggests it is most closely related to the Black Colobus (Colobus satanas) of west-central Africa. The two species are separated by more than 1,200 kilometres of rainforest, implying they diverged around 4–5 million years ago.

Of course, we can't really say it has been discovered. The people living near its habitat in the Congo Basin have known about it for generations. They call it Likweli. Researchers found that only a handful of local communities recognised the monkey, which says something about how restricted its range appears to be—and perhaps that it prefers to keep well away from us. Likweli has now been adopted as its common name, although the meaning of the word has not been published. Then again, ask most English speakers why a fox is called a fox, and you'll probably get little more than a shrug.

Watch this video by Florida Atlantic University to learn more about the research that went into recognising the Likewli as a new species of monkey.

High up in the Ethiopian mountains lives the Gelada.  It lives nowhere else and although its closest living relative is the baboon, with its hairless face and short muzzle the gelada looks more like a chimpanzee.  Isolated in these remote Ethiopian Highlands (often called The Roof of Africa) this primate has developed a way of existence (one might call it a culture) all of its own.

To begin with the gelada is a graminivore which means that it only eats grass.  Fortunately, the highlands in which they live are cooler and a lot less arid than many parts of Ethiopia and they rarely experience any kind of food shortage.  They will also become granivorous when the grass is in seed.  In fact, they actively prefer the seed to the grass – it is probably a welcome change.

It must have been an awe-inspiring sight – millions upon millions of passenger pigeons flying across the American landscape.  Forest-loving (and living) pigeons were never seen alone – they would flock and migrate from the southern forest to their breeding grounds in the north.  The size of the flocks was so large that they would darken the sky, destroy tree branches with their weight (roosting literally on top of each other) and leave behind a carpet of passenger pigeon poop.  And then, they were gone.

There had been between 3 and 5 billion passenger pigeons in the USA and in the space of just a few decades there was just one left (in a zoo).  This endling – the name given to the last member of a species was known as Martha.  This is not only her story, of course, but that of her entire species.

This is the story of yet another clash between humans and birds – another which led to the extinction of a species that was once so numerous it was uncountable.  The reason for the extinction of the passenger pigeon is not as simple as you might think – it’s more than just being hunted to extinction.  This fascinating video by Bizarre Beasts posits that it was the telegraph and the railway that finally did for this bird – as well as (ironically) its own particular survival strategy which, until our arrival, had served it well for thousands of years.