The Schneider marmoset is found in a highly threatened but understudied forest area of Mato Grosso state, Brazil.
A team of researchers has discovered a new species of monkey, the small long-tailed monkey, in the Brazilian Amazon.
Schneider’s monkey (Miko Schneider), described in the latest issue of Scientific Reports, is named after Professor Horacio Schneider, an important pioneer and collaborator in the investigation of ape diversity and evolution.
The discovery was made by a team of researchers led by Rodrigo Costa Araújo, currently a research associate at Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, in Brazil. Araujo is funded in part by the Conservation Leadership Program (CLP), a training partnership between WCS, BirdLife International and Fauna & Flora International (FFI).
The Amazonian Miku are among the most diverse groups of monkeys and are found only in the threatened forests of the “deforestation arc,” an area that accounts for half of global land-use change in the past 30 years. Currently, there is no conservation response to deal with the habitat losses and population reductions that these snails are subject to, mainly because they are not well studied.
The total number of Amazonian snail species is still unknown. In 2019, Araújo and his team discovered a Munduruku monkey (Mico munduruku) in another area within the “arc of deforestation”. M. schneideri has been described from the well-known ape monkey by researchers since 1995, but has been incorrectly identified as M. emiliae.
The study notes that there are 16 types of exercise located in the “deforestation arc” – a large region in the southern Amazon where the highest rates of deforestation and fires are concentrated. Further research is needed to assess the conservation status of M. schneideri and to investigate the southern part of its geographical distribution. Furthermore, continuing to discover exactly how many Amazonian monkeys occupy these forests will serve as the basis for the first step toward preserving this endangered group of monkeys.
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