ABOVE: Sumatra, Indonesia
© ISTOCK.COM, RIZA AZHARI
For the first time since 1929, a new species of great ape has been discovered: Pongo tapanuliensis, an orangutan that lives in the Batang Toru forest in Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. The Tapanuli orangutan is the third species of its genus (Pongo), and the seventh great ape member. A description of the new species was published in Current Biology today (November 2).
The remote population of orangutans in the Batang Toru forest had only been discovered in 1997. But it was Matthew Nowak, a conservationist with the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program, who found the first evidence that it could be a distinct species in 2013: specifically, the bones of a male that had been injured by local humans and later died were distinctly different from other orangutan species.
In the latest study, a team of scientists led by Michael Krützen from the University of Zurich ...
