Miss Waldron's Red Colobus Monkey

"Procolobus badius waldroni was unknown to science until one day in December 1933, when the British naturalist Willoughby Lowe shot and preserved eight of the large red-and-black monkeys during a collecting expedition in the southwestern Ashanti region of the Gold Coast, now Ghana . . . It wasn't until the 1950s that anyone noticed Miss Waldron's red colobus was disappearing. Ernest Hemingway was extolling the virtues of the hunt, and both Africans and foreigners thought the supply of game—and trees—was limitless. Europe's ravenous commercial logging was taking large bites from the primary habitat of waldroni, Ghana's southwestern Tano-Nimiri Forest. No one realized it then, but deforestation was particularly devastating to these monkeys . . . In their 2000 Conservation Biology article, Oates and McGraw broke the bad news to the world: Miss Waldron's red colobus could not be found anywhere."