By Matthew Burkhart, Communications and Education Assistant, Undergraduate, North Carolina State University. With Martin Kratt, Duke ‘89. Originally published in LEMURS Magazine: Reasons for Hope in February 2026. Few animals have inspired children and conservationists alike as profoundly as Jovian, the Coquerel’s sifaka who brought primate conservation into living rooms around the world as the […]
Posted March 9, 2026. In Madagascar and other low-income countries, charcoal and firewood are still the dominant cooking fuels. But traditional charcoal has major drawbacks: Producing traditional charcoal involves cutting trees, a significant cause of deforestation. For millions of women cooking daily meals for their families, exposure to smoke from dirty fuel causes respiratory disease. […]
Take a video tour of our dedicated lemur hospital, the Anna Borruel Codina Center for Lemur Medicine and Research! Made possible thanks to an $8M gift by an anonymous Duke alumnus whose family has a passion for lemurs and wildlife protection, the Borruel Center features cutting-edge surgery and intensive care suites, dedicated quarantine and recovery spaces, […]
Established in 1966, the Duke Lemur Center is a world leader in the study, care, and protection of lemurs—Earth’s most threatened group of mammals. In this new video, we’ve partnered with CYLNDR Studios to explore a fresh way to tell our story. By responsibly using AI tools, we were able to create visuals that […]
At the Duke Lemur Center, lemurs free-range in large tracts of forest and live in natural social groups, giving researchers and visitors the opportunity to observe the same behaviors, social structures, and age classes that would be observed in the wild. Many of these behaviors are seen in this video, including: ✅ Play ✅ […]
Who would have thought that a small collection of mixed primates brought to Duke Forest in 1966 would grow into a global force in lemur care, research, and conservation? In LEMURS Magazine: The “Where” Issue, we highlight the work we do around the globe, from North Carolina to Madagascar and everywhere in between!
There are at least seven species of bamboo in the SAVA (northeastern) region of Madagascar, some native and some introduced. Some lemurs are bamboo-eating specialists! People in Madagascar use bamboo for diverse purposes, even building their houses from it. Some bamboo are so dense, they make excellent substitutes for wood—and because they can grow […]
Ren Collins, a summer intern with the DLC Museum of Natural History, traveled with the Duke fossil team to Wyoming in 2023. There, Ren captured drone footage of the badlands to tell the story of fossils from the field to the museum.
