In the year 1551 a strange male animal was put on public display in Augsburg Germany.

He had humanlike fingers on his hands and feet,observes noted,and a cheerful creature,although he also had a tendency to turn his backside to viewers.Based on an illustration of the creature,biologist think it was most likely a drill,a baboonlike primate,Even today,more than 450 years later,drills are studied so infrequently in the wild that when a samll team of biologist recently spotted a troop of them on Equatorial Guinea's Bioko Island,they collectively gasped,then sat down on the rain forests floor to watch.The drill,the largest primates on Bioko,were climbing and feeding in a fig tree at the floor of the island's 70000-foot-high Gran Caldera.Earlier that morning the scientists had spotted troops each five thirty strong of chattering monkeys,red eared,black colobus,and red colobus,the latter one of the most threatened of all primates.Biologist regard Bioko Island as a living laboratory for studying how plants and animals evolve in isolation.It lies in the Gulf of Guinea,20 miles off the west coast of Africa,one of four islands in an archipelago.The three others-Sao Tome,Principe,and Annobon-are deepwater isles formed tens of millions of years ago and colonized by plants and animals from Africa that arrived on their shores by chance.




Bioko however,was connected to the Africa mainland during each ice age,most recently about 12000 years ago.Like an exclusive ark,the island shelters an isolated set of subspecies evolved separately from those on the mainland.There are seven species of monkeys,including the drills,four galagos bush babies,two small antelopes duikers,one species of porcupine,one species of tree hyrax,one species of pouched rat,and three species of scaly-tailed squirrels.There are catlike linsang but no lions or leopards.The roster once included forest buffalo,but they were hunted to extinction a century ago.Add orchids,land snails,freshwater fish,amphibians,spiders,and inspects-all evovling apart from their mainland relatives.In the island's interior,grasslands,woodlands,and rain forest remain much as they were when the first Portuguese explorers stepped ashore in the 15th century,largely untouched and beautiful.It's as closely to prisine as any place I've seen,said Gail Hearn,one of the researchers leading the expedition into the Gran Caldera-her 13th trip into its forested depths.A primatologist at Pennsylvania's Drexel Univeristy,Hearn made her first trip here in 1990,intending to start to a long term study of Bioko Island drills.Instead,I just fell in love with the whole place.she said We've done so much damage to this planet.Here it's undamaged and impossibly beautiful.It feels like a place where one person could make a difference.Hearn organized the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Progarm BBPP.Each January she brings together teams of scientists and American and Equatorial Guinean students for comprehensive biodiversity surveys.This year a team sponsored by National Geographic magazine,Conservation International,and the International League of Conservation Photographers joined her for a 12 day RAVE Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition to document as many monkeys as possible,along the rest of Bioko's stunning variety of other speices-a richness protected by the island's history but now threatened by rampant hunting.Bioko's flora and fauna so impressed the first European visitor,15th century Portuguese explorer Fernao do Po,that he named the island Formosa,beautiful.European who followed wanted to plant their first American colony here.