Roads negatively affect wildlife populations globally, causing habitat fragmentation that can facilitate mortality by access to forest for poaching and wildlife collisions with vehicles. Primate habitats are vulnerable to fragmentation exposing them to anthropogenic threats. Endangered dusky langurs (Trachypithecus obscurus) in Malaysia are often found in urban areas and have been frequent victims of vehicle collisions. To mitigate the hazardous impact of a busy asphalt road on wild dusky langurs in Teluk Bahang, Penang, we built the first artificial road canopy bridge in Malaysia in February 2019 to assist arboreal wildlife to move between habitat fragments more safely. Four days after the bridge construction, the first long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) was recorded via a camera trap crossing the bridge, and plantain squirrels (Callosciurus notatus) and dusky langurs first crossed one and eight months later, respectively. The bridge was upgraded from a single-firehose rope to a double-rope in August 2020 to assess the effectiveness of the two designs. In total, 2128 animal crossings comprising three mammal species were recorded between March 2019 and May 2021. Plantain squirrels crossed the bridge most frequently with 2075 crossings, long-tailed macaques crossed 32 times, and dusky langurs 21 times. There was a significant difference in bridge use according to species between the two designs (Chi-Square, p < 0.001). Since the construction of the bridge, the rate of previously frequently reported primate roadkills near the bridge location has dropped to zero. This successful pilot project has spurred the efforts to implement more canopy bridges country-wide to support primate conservation efforts and better protect arboreal wildlife from the negative impacts of linear infrastructure.

Interspecific hybridization in primates is common but hybridization between distantly related sympatric primate species is rarely observed in the wild. We present evidence for a possible hybridization event between Nasalis larvatus and Trachypithecus cristatus in the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, Sabah, through assessment of photographs. We used a set of categorical characters and metric measurements to compare the putative hybrid with the likely parent species. Nonmetric comparison showed that this “mystery monkey” is intermediate in several characters. Measurements of limb proportions on photographs showed that the brachial, humerofemoral, and intermembral indexes are above 100 for N. larvatus and below 100 for T. cristatus on all photographs, whereas the crural index is higher than 100 in both species and the distributions of this index in the two species overlap. Brachial and intermembral indices of the putative hybrid were similar to those of N. larvatus . Crural and humerofemoral indices were closer to the values for T. cristatus than those of N. larvatus . Multiple observers confirmed the occurrence of mixed-species groups in the area, and interspecific mating has been photographed. The putative hybrid is now an adult female and was last photographed in September 2020 with an infant and swollen breast, suggesting lactation. We propose further noninvasive fecal sampling for genetic analyses to confirm the origins of this “mystery monkey.” This case of hybridization may be related to anthropogenic changes to the landscape, whereby expansion of oil palm plantations confines N. larvatus and T. obscurus to narrow riverine forest patches along the Kinabatangan. This observation therefore also may have conservation implications, indicating limited mate access and dispersal opportunities for these threatened primates. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10764-022-00293-z.