New Species of Lemur Discovered in Madagascar

At the end of 2010, on an expedition led by Conservation International¹s president and advisory board member of Stiftung Artenschutz, Dr Russ Mittermeier, a lemur species believed to be new to science has been found. The squirrel-sized lemur that lives in Madagascar has a black, Y-shaped line that starts above each eye and joins together as a single line on the top of the head, creating a fork.
In the forests of Madagascar there are other fork-marked lemur species, called Phaner lemurs, but this is the first one, which has been discovered in Daraina, a protected area in the northeast of Madagascar. The lemur was spotted first time in 1995, but since then it could not be caught and examined by scientists.
The newly discovered lemur looks like most of the Phaner lemurs, but it has a slightly different colour pattern and also displays an unusual behaviour. That’s why Dr Mittermeier assumes that it is a new species – a fact that should be confirmed by a subsequent genetic analysis.
If confirmed as a new species, the fork-marked lemur should be named after Fanamby, a Malagasy conservation organisation, engaged in the conservation of the forests of Daraina.