“For decades, a colony of wild African green monkeys has lived in a thick mangrove forest near the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport,” Forbes says. “But how on earth did these African monkeys find themselves in … South Florida … ?”
“Earlier this week, a team of researchers from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) announced that they had solved the mystery,” Forbes reported on Friday, May 21, 2021. Read story here.
Using DNA analysis, the researchers traced them to a “jailbreak” in 1948 from a local facility that imported primates from Africa to sell for medical research. That had “long been suspected,” Forbes said, and now DNA and the facility’s records (it closed in 1956; read more about it here) have confirmed it.
Photo: The monkeys are a common sight at an airport parking lot adjacent to the forest.