From the BBC comes the story of an intrepid and dedicated scientist who has spent decades working in China’s mountain forests in an effort to protect and understand one of the nation’s most amazing animals.
The golden sub-nosed monkey is revered alongside the giant panda as “national treasures” of Chinese wildlife, yet this couldn’t protect them from logging and hunting that followed in the wake of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Members of this sub-species located in the UNESCO-listed Shennongjia mountains of Hubei Province, were the subject of intense study by Professor Yang Jingyuan, a research ecologist who arrived in these mountains in 1991.
For Yang, the golden sub-nosed monkey was Jane Austin’s chimpanzees. By the time Yang arrived in Shennongjia, the population had collapsed to just