May 30, 2026

Meet the hybrid monkeys of Gombe National Park

Photo: Dr. Kate Detwiler

Yes, the Jane Goodall Institute’s Gombe Stream Research Centre is known for the world’s longest-running wild chimpanzee study, which Dr. Jane started more than 65 years ago – but researchers there study other wildlife, too.

Just take Dr. Kate Detwiler as an example. For her, one of the most exciting moments came from studying the DNA of blue monkeys.

“When I screened them for the mitochondrial marker for blue monkeys, every single blue monkey at Gombe had the red-tail marker,” she said. “All the blue monkeys that we see today are descendants from hybridization events in the past.”

This fascinating research gets back to questions that scientists and naturalists have been asking for some time now – how are species defined, and how are new species created?

With Dr. Detwiler and her team hard at work, we can’t wait to see what answers they get from Gombe’s hybrid monkeys – or how the legacy of Gombe continues.