A new species of lemur has been discovered on the Southeastern Madagascar, making it the 133rd lemur species

The lemurs are a clade of primates that are only found on the island Madagascar, just off the eastern coast of sub-Saharan Africa. They are genetically unique, and separated from the other primates at about 63 million years ago. After separating from the other primates, the lemurs have evolved independently on Madagascar, and have even had a convergent evolution that allowed them to have some very unique species of lemurs that fills otherwise vacant ecological niches. This has lead the lemurs to having some of the smallest primates in the world, and at one point they also had one of the largest primes ever known, which really shows how differently they evolved.

An indri (Indri indri), one of the largest lemurs (and not the one the title is about). Image by Erik Patel, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

A new species of lemur has been discovered

As mentioned in the title of the post, a recently published paper in Primate Conservation has found and described a completely new-to-science lemur, called the Grove's dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus grovesi). This new species is about the size of a American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), so the dwarf part of the name is not without meaning. The Grove part of the name is a tribute to Colin Groves, a zoologist who have described over 50 new species in his career.

Grove's dwarf lemur was found in two different locations on Madagascar, but both were in national parks, meaning that it will most likely have a natural protection despite not having been classified as either threatened or non-threatened yet (these reports take a lot of time to do). One of the locations is a dense rainforest, while the other is actually pretty different; a mix of forest and grassland. This could suggest that it could have been a lot more widespread, since it does not seem to be tied exclusively to one niche (this last sentence is my own speculation, and not written in the paper).

Some images of Grove’s dwarf lemur, as well as illustrations that compare it to closely related species. Illustrations by Stephen D. Nash ©Conservation International. Photographs by Edward E. Louis, Jr.

The newly found lemur is also really cute, with large, black eyes, a long, fluffy tail, ears that look like that of a teddy bear, and dexterous hands. It spends most of its time in the canopy, where they live, eat and reproduce. The research team had to use dart guns to capture them, and took both blood and tissue samples that were used for DNS analyses to make sure it was in fact a new species.

There might be more lemur species coming soon!

The paper also mentions the fact that many new lemur species are likely to be described in the near future, since there have been a lot of new discoveries in the last few years. It does however take a long time to fully describe a new species, and this process means that there could potentially be lots of undescribed samples in labs around the world (or they might show that these are just phenotypically different members of another already described species).

Thanks for reading

Thank you for reading my post about the newly described Grove’s dwarf lemur. If you are interested in learning more, then I suggest that you check out the published article in Primate Conservation. It is available for free, so there’s no reason to not take a look at it. The Wikipedia entry on Evolution of lemurs is also really good if you want a closer look at how the evolved differently from the monkeys and apes.

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