A University of Fort Hare zoology team led international researchers to the discovery of a new bushbaby genus living on the east coast of Africa. The team will soon publish its research paper in a zoological journal, making the find official.Alice zoology department's Judith Masters, who has been researching the diversity, evolution, distribution and conservation of bushbabies since 1978, said the discovery was important because it had been driven by climate and environmental change."It is very exciting, because the last time a new genus [subfamily] of the bushbabies was discovered was in 1872," she said.The professor, who led the project along with field researcher Fabien Génin, said the dwarf bushbabies of the east coast were unlike the West African ones.She said the team had first identified the new group of bushbabies in Zanzibar."It was a study based on using vocal signals to identify species. It was the first time I had heard calls from this bushbaby group."When we returned to South Africa we were pretty sure they would occur in this country because the habitat in northern KwaZulu-Natal is similar, so we went to look and sure as nuts we heard them calling. We knew from the structure of their call it was the same genus."She said the nocturnal primates were different to the "nagapies" of Pretoria, with longer noses, chocolate brown colouring, black eye rings and ears and a bright white stripe down the nose.She said the find was significant because climate change was responsible not only for the extinction of species, but also for the origination of new lineages...