‘Who was Brumback?’ was the question as we watched the family group of the eponymous night monkeys in the rewilded grounds of Rancho Camaná near Restropo in Colombia.
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| Mother and baby (top right centre) Brumback's Night Monkey, Aotus.brumbacki Rancho Camaná, near Restrepo, Meta, Colombia. November 2026 |
In 1968, aged 19, Roger Alan Brumback was a first-year student at Pennsylvania State Medical College. He was looking for a research project. He talked with Dennis Staton in the anatomy department who had developed an interest in primatology and along with a former colleague had been developing chromosome analysis to investigate the phylogeny of monkeys. Nobody had looked at the chromosome complement (karyotype) of what was then believed to be just the one species of night monkey, then more widely called the owl Monkey. He bought some monkeys in the local town (!) (Hershey, Pennsylvania) and also visited Boston where he collected lots of blood and tissue samples from the zoo’s and a dealer’s stock. He then spent several years completing the work and in doing so realised that he appeared to be dealing with not one but two species. That work, together with a paper on the analysis of blood proteins which also showed a bimodal pattern, was published in the early 1970s. As such it provided the first clue that night monkeys were not a single species. By 1975 Brumback’s medical research life had moved away from the karyotpyes of monkeys and he gave all his material to Philip Hershkovitz of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In leaving the field through he also published a plea to other working of night monkeys to do the same.
At this stage it was a case of Brumback exits stage left.
Nearly thirty years later came Brumback’s discovery of his own discovery
In 2000 Brumback visited San Diego Zoo where he found himself looking at the night monkeys and at the label on their cage. He did not recognise the name Aotus nancymai but realised it must have been coined to honour Nancy Shui-Fong Ma, who had started work on the karyotype of primates at the time he was leaving the field. Intrigued by what he had seen Brumback looked up night monkeys and found as he scanned the list of species ‘Brumback’s Owl Monkey (Aotus brumbacki)’. He had no idea that Hershkovitz had worked on the taxonomy of night monkeys, including Brumback’s deposited specimens, and had published the revision in 1983. Hershkovitz confirmed the earlier suspicions and named one species Aotus brumbacki. Hershkovitz wrote: “The taxonomic revisions proposed by Brumback were not generally accepted. His urgent appeals to biological investigators for precise identifications of night monkeys they used in scientific research went largely unheeded”.
Brumback acted quickly to ‘provide a substantial donation’ to the American Society of Primatologists’ Conservation Fund aimed at the study and conservation of his eponymous night monkey.
Roger Brumback had made a name for himself in neurology and pathology, latterly in Alzheimer’s disease, moving to the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in 1975, National Institutes of Health, University of Pittsburgh, University of North Dakota, University of Rochester and finally the University of Oklahoma’s medical college in 1986 where in 2000 he was David Ross Boyd Professor in the Department of Pathology.
The story does not end there. In 2013 Roger Brumback and his wife, Mary, were murdered at home by a former resident doctor on the pathology course, Anthony Garcia. Brumback, then chairman of his department, had been obliged to remove Garcia from his residency because of incompetence and erratic behaviour. In 2008 the man had been been dismissed from another pathology course in Omaha, Nebraska. A bit of smart policing suggested that the Brumback murders were linked to those of the son and housekeeper of the head of the course in Nebraska the day after Garcia was removed. Anthony Joseph Garcia was found guilty of all four murders and sentenced to death. Appeals against conviction have been rejected and he remains on death row in Tecumseh, Nebraska.
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| Roger and Mary Brumback in 2005 |
Roach ES, Bodensteiner JB. 2013. Obituary: Roger Alan Brumback, MD (1948-2013). Journal of Child Neurology 28, 703-705 DOI: 10.1177/0883073813493717
Wallis J. 2000. New species of owl monkey re-discovered…30 years later. American Society of Primatologists Newsletter 24 (2), 5.
