Orangutans may be the oddest of our great ape relatives. The cinnamon-colored animals — the only great apes native to Asia — live nowhere else but Indonesia. Graceful when swinging through the rain forest canopy though awkward on the ground, orangutans are solitary and seldom seen. Orangutans give birth only every six to nine years, one of the slowest mammalian reproductive rates.
In the early 2000s, biologists recognized that orangutans were two species, Bornean and Sumatran orangutans. An analysis of ape DNA in 2011 indicated these orangutan species split apart about 400,000 years ago. Now a team of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists, publishing their work Thursday in the journal Current Biology, says there is a third orangutan offshoot: Pongo tapanuliensis, or the Tapanuli orangutan.