With funding from The Leakey Foundation, scientists have discovered a new species of orangutan in Sumatra. This great ape is "among the most threatened great apes in the world."
In 1887 M. Eugène Dubois set out to what was then the Dutch East Indies in search of the missing link. More than a century later, Leakey Foundation Grantee Julien Louys followed in Dubois' footsteps to look for fossils in the caves of Sumatra.
Who doesn’t love orangutans? These highly intelligent, critically endangered great apes that live in the tropical forests of Sumatra and Borneo have faces with such character, such personality, they always make for great, powerful pictures.
Brigitte Spillmann, PhD candidate at the University of Zurich, was awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant in the spring of 2010 for her project entitled “The function(s) of a long-distance signal: The orangutan long call.” We recently featured a summary of her work along with her research report on our blog. Click here to read the post. We are now pleased to learn that she has published… more »