This big-eyed furball is the Bangka slow loris, a creature that in 2015 was believed to potentially be extinct.
As the video demonstrates, the Bangka slow loris (N. bancanus) is still very much with us—thanks to a local wildlife organization on the island of Bangka that had been rescuing and returning them to the wild for years.
The last documented sighting of a Bangka slow loris in Western science occurred in the 1930s, and in 2015 it was considered “possibly extinct.” The organization’s years of work protecting these animals seems to have gone completely under the radar.
A paper published by Austrian scientists with international colleagues on the “rediscovery” details how their first notion that this species of slow loris still existed was a 2022 field guide to the primates of Indonesia.
The author, named Supriatna, mentioned the Gunung Maras National Park, a small forest near the city of Muntok on Bangka Island, as a habitat of the species.
Supriatna also cited another scientist’s unpublished thesis concerning Bangka slow lorises held at the Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center. From there it was a rather straightforward task of learning a bit more about the Alobi Center to determine that the animal had never gone extinct.
“By presenting the data collected by the Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center on N. bancanus since 2015, we demonstrate that the Bangka Slow Loris still exists and is probably more widely distributed across Bangka Island than previously documented,” the authors wrote.
Between 2015 and 2025, the center rescued more than 90 Bangka slow lorises, 86 of which were subsequently released, Smithsonian Magazine wrote. In almost all cases, the rescues were necessary because the animals had strayed too close to civilization and ended up in people’s gardens, plantations, or on roads.
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The study is “another reminder that conservation depends on the knowledge of local communities, Indigenous peoples and others who know these species and landscapes intimately,” wrote Benji Barca, program manager for the global conservation organization Re:wild, in a statement. “A species can disappear from the scientific record without disappearing from the lives of the people who share its home.”
The Bangka slow loris is one of the world’s only venomous primates. Though omnivorous, this slow loris can secrete a toxin from glands located on its upper arms which it will lick and mix with its saliva to transform its defensive bite into a cytotoxic surprise.
This kind of venom rapidly damages and kills cells and can lead to necrosis and impaired wound healing. They are the only primates, aside from the pygmy slow loris, that have this capability, making them not only a truly remarkable animal, but one which undoubtedly merits enhanced conservation protection.
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