UZH Anthropologists Describe Third Orangutan Species

Two species of Indonesian orangutans had previously been officially described and recognized - the Pongo abelii , living on the island of Sumatra, and the Pongo pygmeaeus , endemic to Borneo. In 1997, researchers at the Australian National University discovered an isolated population of orangutans in Batang Toru, a region within the three Tapanuli districts in North Sumatra. UZH anthropologists working together with an international research team have now established that these orangutans are actually a distinct third species, Pongo tapanuliensis. The study carried out by the UZH researchers is the largest genomic study of wild orangutans to date. Unique teeth and skulls. The first indications of the uniqueness of the Tapanuli population came from the skeletal material of an adult male orangutan killed in 2013 - when compared to other skulls it turned out that certain characteristics of the teeth and skull of the Tapanuli orangutan were unique. "We were quite surprised that the skull was quite different in some characteristics from anything we had seen before," explains Matt Nowak, who researched the morphological characteristics as part of his PhD thesis and now works for the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP).