A 'New' Macaque
In February 2022, I read a news report with a lot of interest. It was a yea! moment. A moment to be celebrated and remembered because scientists had almost literally stumbled upon a 'new' species of India. In fact, this one is the latest mammal species to have been found not just in India but in South-East Asia. This finding takes India's mammal species to 438.
Meet the white-cheeked macaque (Macaca leucogenys). There are absolutely no prizes for guessing how it gets both its scientific and common names. Yes, it has cheeks that are white. It also has dense, long hair on its neck. That's not the only attribute that separates it from other macaques. This one has a longer tail. A team of nine scientists working under Dr Mukesh Thakur and Lalit Sharma of the Zoological Survey of India were delighted with the find because this macaque, first spotted in 2015, had not been seen before that in India. Its first description is as recent as 2015 when Chinese scientists Cheng Li, Chao Zhao, and Peng-Fei Fan wrote about it in the American Journal of Primatology.
This story is from the April 2022 edition of TerraGreen.
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This story is from the April 2022 edition of TerraGreen.
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