Primate Taxonomy by Colin Groves, Smithsonion, £50, ISBN 156098872X
MISS Waldron’s Red Colobus is no more. It’s official: exhaustive searches
have failed to find this primate. And Pennant’s Sanga River Red Colobus has not
been seen for years. It, too, may be extinct. These are probably the first
primate extinctions in modern times. To avoid more, conservation needs
taxonomists.
“Taxonomy is, in today’s tragic biodiversity crisis, the very starting point
for conservation efforts,” says Colin Groves in Primate Taxonomy. Few
can know that better than him. He has spent almost four decades in the world’s
museums and forests, studying mammals…
