Posted for Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

The kipunji was originally discovered in 2003/2004 on the strength of a rumour of a shy and unusual monkey from villages in the southern highlands of Tanzania. Now, after 2,800 hours of field work, the results of the first head count are in – there are only 1,117 of these honk-barking monkeys, and they live in two isolated forests with a total area of just 6.82 square miles.

Several years after it was first discovered, researchers managed to get enough evidence to announce it as a new species, a year later it was further hailed as a whole new genus, the first new monkey genus in over 80 years.

Although the kipunji has already been listed among the World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates it hasn’t yet made it onto the World Conservation Union’s (ICUN) Red List as “critically endangered”, which is where WCS think it should be because of the threats to its habitat.

“The kipunji is hanging on by the thinnest of threads,” says Tim Davenport, Tanzania Country Director for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “We must do all we can to safeguard this extremely rare and little understood species while there is still time.”

With the rate of extinction already thought to be underestimated, it seems likely it will be only a matter of time before the kipunji joins the other 114 primate species classified as threatened with extinction on the ICUN Red List.