Lost and found: how a jungle trek led to first photo of fearless, fluffy-cheeked monkey

The world’s first photo of a Bouvier’s red colobus monkey, an adult female with her young, taken in March 2015 in the Ntokou-Pikounda national park. Photograph: Lieven Devreese

“They have a nice black eyebrow, but I especially liked the fluffy white hairs on their cheeks.” For Congolese primatologist Gaël Elie Gnondo Gobolo, seeing Bouvier’s red colobus monkey (Piliocolobus bouvieri) for the first time “was an unexpected moment, like being in a dream”.

No one knew the monkey still existed in the Republic of the Congo. Assessments for the IUCN in 2008 and 2016 classified it as critically endangered, with a note saying it was “possibly extinct”. There had been no recorded sightings since the 1970s until Lieven Devreese, a primatologist from Belgium, led a two-month expedition in 2015. Gnondo Gobolo was a biology student at Marien Ngouabi University in Brazzaville, Congo’s capital, at the time and accompanied him.