lemures

Lemures (singular: lemur) in Roman religion and folk belief were the restless spirits of the dead — specifically the malevolent or unplacated dead, those who had died violently, before their time, or without proper burial. They were distinct from the lares, the benevolent household spirits of ancestors who had died peacefully. The lemures wandered at night and disturbed the living, and the Romans held a festival, Lemuria, in May to drive them away: the paterfamilias would rise before dawn, wash his hands three times, put black beans in his mouth, throw them behind him without looking, and repeat nine times 'haec ego mitto, his redimo meque meosque fabis' — 'these I send, with these beans I redeem myself and mine.' The spirits, it was believed, gathered the beans.

When the first accounts of Madagascar's unusual primates reached European naturalists in the 17th and 18th centuries, the animals made an immediate impression. They moved at night, had enormous, reflective eyes that seemed to glow in darkness, and emitted eerie vocalizations that Malagasy people themselves associated with the spirits of ancestors. The Malagasy word for certain lemur species, babakoto and related terms, also carried ancestral connotations. Carl Linnaeus, when he came to formally name these creatures in his Systema Naturae (1758), reached for lemures: the haunting, nocturnal quality of the animals connected them, in his mind, to the Roman spirits of the restless dead. He was being literary rather than scientific, but the name carried.

Madagascar — the island that separated from mainland Africa approximately 160 million years ago and from India around 88 million years ago — evolved in isolation, and its fauna is correspondingly strange. Lemurs are primates, but they represent a lineage that diverged from the line leading to monkeys and apes approximately 55 to 60 million years ago, when their ancestors rafted across the Mozambique Channel to Madagascar on natural vegetation. On the mainland, they were eventually outcompeted by more derived primates; in Madagascar, with no competition, they diversified into over 100 species, filling ecological niches occupied elsewhere by antelopes, insectivores, and — in the case of the now-extinct giant lemurs — hippopotamus-sized herbivores.

Today approximately 98 percent of lemur species are threatened with extinction, making lemurs collectively the world's most endangered group of mammals. The pressures are deforestation, bushmeat hunting, and the capture trade. The island that gave them refuge for 55 million years is being stripped at one of the fastest rates in the world. Linnaeus's choice of name — spirits of the dead, haunting the forest — has acquired an accuracy he could not have intended. The creatures that seemed like ghosts in 1758 are becoming them.