Newly discovered primate 'already facing extinction'

It isn't newly discovered - it is newly described. The animals which form the new species have been known for a long time - at least since the early 1900s - as a population of Phayre's Langur (generally included within the nominate subspecies). The paper has simply elevated it, along with the two recognised subspecies of Phayre's Langur, to full species, although the genetic results do not precisely match the distributions of the current subspecies (phayrei and shanicus). Therefore T. p. shanicus has been renamed as T. melamera which is an older name.

Annoyingly for me Mount Popa is less than two hours from Bagan and can be visited by foreign tourists, but I didn't know of it when I was in Burma (finding information on wildlife-watching in Burma is not particularly easy).

Paper here: Mitogenomic phylogeny of the Asian colobine genus <i>Trachypithecus</i> with special focus on <i>Trachypithecus phayrei</i> (Blyth, 1847) and description of a new species

 

When I read through this paper initially the other day, I noticed that the photo of T. melamera as used in Figure 6 was of an animal in a surprisingly similar pose to one of my photos (in the Yadanabon Zoo gallery here on Zoochat) but didn't think much else of it. Today while updating the Old World Primate thread to include the splits I realised that the photo - credited as "Adult female T. melamera at Mandalay Zoo, Myanmar (photo by Tilo Nadler)" - actually is my photo lifted from Zoochat. It has just been brightened but otherwise is identical right down to the positions of out-of-focus wires etc in the background.