Orange lips and roaring calls: meet the DRC’s shy new rainforest monkey

There are 536 species of monkeys in the world today and the Democratic Republic of Congo has a new one.

Named Likweli, this rainforest primate is one of only five new African monkey species described in the past 75 years.

Despite its distinctive orange lips, it has only been spotted by locals a few times since 2008.

It took PhD student in biological sciences Junior Amboko (who named the new monkey) and an international team that included anthropologist Kate Detwiler years of searching by foot and canoe, and conducting field observations, photographs, audio recordings, genetic analysis and anatomical analysis to prove that Likweli was a species new to science.

They explain their search.

What is Likweli and what convinced you that this was a new species? Likweli ( Colobus congoensis ) is a relatively small colobus monkey, weighing about 7kg, with silky black hair and a long black tail.

Like all colobus monkeys, it has no thumbs.

Its most distinctive features are its face and rump.

Its face is black and dark grey, framed by long, spiky black hair that continues across the forehead and onto the top of the head.

The most striking feature is the pale orange-cream skin around the mouth and beneath the nose, which stands out against the dark face, especially when it makes its deep, roaring calls.

At the base of the tail is a bright white patch.

We became convinced that Likweli was a new species of monkey because our genetic analyses showed that the ancestor of Likweli split from the ancestor of Colobus satanas , another similar species found today in the region, about four to five million years ago.

This was much further back than we expected and provided strong evidence that Likweli is a distinct species.

What’s more, the two species are separated by more than 1,200km and several major rivers.