Critically Endangered
Ursine colobus
Colobus vellerosus
Ursine colobus is an Old World monkey in the family Cercopithecidae (order Primates) — Colobus vellerosus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The ursine colobus is quite distinctive, with predominantly black fur and lacking a white mantle. The ursine colobus is further characterized by white patches on the thighs that vary in width and length. Like other species of colobus, the babies are born with an all white fur coat, that starts to turn black at around three months of age.
Range and habitat
Ursine colobuses are found in lowland rainforest and in gallery forests that extend northwards into the Guinea Forest Savannah Zone. In Bénin, these monkeys were observed in several habitats, among them swamp forests, semi-deciduous forests and gallery forests. It is found in Benin, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo, as well as very southernmost Burkina Faso.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
The ursine colobus is threatened by both hunting and deforestation. Its range falls within a region that includes a dense and rapidly growing human population, where forest destruction has been extensive, and there is uncontrolled hunting of wildlife in many places.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Ursine colobus is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Ursine colobus, Wikidata item Q546456. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
