- Scientists just rediscovered a hidden world of chimpanzees — and it’s more alive than anyone expected
Deep in a Nigerian wilderness that went dark for almost a decade, camera traps are now blinking awake — and the chimps they’re filming are carrying babies.
GASHAKA GUMTI NATIONAL PARK, Nigeria — Somewhere in the mountain forests of northeastern Nigeria, a chimpanzee no one has officially seen in years is moving through the trees. She is dark-faced, long-cheeked, and, based on the camera-trap footage that researchers have just started collecting, carrying an infant. She belongs to Pan troglodytes ellioti — the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee — and until this week, science had no idea how she or her group were doing.
That changes now.
Pan troglodytes ellioti is the rarest of the four recognised chimpanzee subspecies, with somewhere between 3,500 and 9,000 individuals surviving in a fragmented strip of forest along the Nigeria-Cameroon border. What is extraordinary about this animal is how recently we even knew it existed. In 1997, researcher Mary Katherine Gonder and her colleagues sat down with DNA extracted from hair samples collected in this very park, ran the sequences, and found something unexpected: the chimpanzees of Gashaka were not western chimpanzees, as taxonomists had assumed. They were something genetically distinct — a fourth subspecies, separated from its nearest relatives by the Sanaga River, which has been quietly splitting chimpanzee populations for hundreds of thousands of years. The name ellioti came later, honouring 19th-century zoologist Daniel Giraud Elliot, who had collected specimens long before anyone had the tools to understand what he was actually looking at.
That 1997 discovery should have been the beginning of a golden age of research. Instead, the story of Pan troglodytes ellioti became one of the most frustrating in primate science. It was the least studied subspecies, in one of the least stable parts of West Africa. By 2018, escalating insecurity in the region had pushed every researcher out of Gashaka Gumti, Nigeria’s largest protected wilderness. The rangers went too. The research station that had spent years becoming a hub for chimpanzee fieldwork fell into disrepair, its roofs caving in, its offices rotting. Poachers moved into the vacuum.
But not everyone left.
Maigari grew up in Gashaka village, in the same forest his father and grandfather knew. He had been working as a field assistant, learning to track chimps through terrain that defeats most outsiders. When the project collapsed and the money stopped, he kept coming back anyway. “It’s our bush,” he told Mongabay this month. “The chimps are my friends.” For years, he and a small group of fellow field assistants did informally what the international conservation machine had stopped doing officially: they watched.
It was the Nigerian government’s co-management agreement with local nonprofit Africa Nature Investors Foundation (ANI) that changed everything. More than 180 rangers have now been hired and trained. Security returned. And with it, researchers. The first major scientific survey here since 2018 is now underway — an ambitious camera-trap deployment across the full 600,000-hectare park, using a helicopter to reach the deep forest basins and ridges that were never accessible on foot. What the cameras are finding is remarkable: new groups, never previously documented. Mothers with infants. Evidence that, even through the silence of the last eight years, this population has been holding on.
Pan troglodytes ellioti is not just rare — it is ecologically irreplaceable. It lives at the intersection of two of West Africa’s most important forest blocks, dispersing seeds, shaping the understorey, maintaining the forest architecture that hundreds of other species depend on. What happens to these chimpanzees ripples outward in ways science is still working to understand. Getting scientists back into Gashaka Gumti, getting cameras into the forest, getting eyes on a population that had essentially vanished from the scientific record — that is this week’s win. And the infants in those camera-trap images? They are the win that matters most. The next generation of the world’s rarest chimpanzees, growing up in a forest that has just, finally, started being watched again.
Below is a glimpse at one of the first photos taken by one of the cameras
Screenshot from the first camera-trap video showing a Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee courtesy of SWNDF
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