Miss Waldron's red colobus

Miss Waldron's red colobus, Piliocolobus waldronae, is a red colobus native to West Africa that was once described as a subspecies of the western red colobus. Willoughby P. Lowe, a collector for the British Museum (Natural History), found it in December 1933 after shooting eight specimens, and Robert William Hayman named it for the museum employee Miss Fanny Waldron. Black fur covers most of the body, with bright red fur on the forehead and thighs, and it grows to about a metre in height. High-canopy rainforest in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire is its only habitat, and it lives in large, noisy family groups of twenty or more that feed on fruit, seeds and foliage. Poaching for bushmeat and habitat destruction drove it down. It has not been officially sighted since 1978 and was declared extinct in 2000, but the IUCN, which lists it as critically endangered, did not accept that, and a relict population may survive in the Ehy Forest. No photograph of a living animal is known.