Primatological relics of the Mission Brazzà-Pecile in Equatorial Africa at the Museo di Storia Naturale of Florence University, with taxonomic notes

Abstract

The recent publication of the travel journal by Giacomo Savorgnan di Brazzà, head of a scientific mission to Western Equatorial Africa on behalf of the French government in the years 1883–1886, provides a great opportunity to increase our knowledge of a small sample of primate specimens, now preserved in the Zoological Section of the University of Florence Natural History Museum. In the present paper, some of the taxonomic aspects of the new primate species proposed on the basis of the Brazzà-Pecile’s collection deposited at the Museum National de Histoire Naturelle in Paris are also discussed. Thanks to the newly available information stored in their diaries, it is now possible to restrict more precisely type localities of newly described taxa: namely Cercopithecus brazzae, Cercocebus agilis, Colobus guereza occidentalis and Piliocolobus bouvieri.