Photograph courtesy ZSL Published July 19, 2010 Long thought to
be extinct, one of the world's rarest primates has been caught
on camera for the first time, scientists announced Monday.
(Related: "'Extinct' Bird Seen, Eaten.") Discovered in 1937 but
"missing" for 60 years, Sri Lanka's Horton Plains slender loris
was presumed to have died out. In 2002 a fleeting nighttime
sighting of something looking like the elusive tree-dweller,
however, gave conservationists hope. Follow-up surveys led by
the Zoological Society of London finally confirmed the lorises
are alive—if not exactly well—in 2009, when two individuals were
photographed and examined. Initial estimates after the
rediscovery put the total world population at fewer than a
hundred, said the society's conservation biologist Craig Turner.
And in this case, the world is limited to high cloud forests in
the Horton Plains area (map) of central Sri Lanka—the animal's
only known habitat. "Potentially this is the rarest primate
we're aware of today," Turner sai