A scientist's 4-decade quest to save the biggest monkey in the Americas

CARATINGA, Brasil (AP) — The emerald-green canopy shifts and rustles as a troop of willowy, golden-gray monkeys slides through a tropical ecosystem more threatened than the Amazon. 

Karen Strier started studying the biggest monkey in the Americas four decades ago, when there were just 50 of the animals left in this swath of the Atlantic forest, in southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state.  

Strier immediately fell in love with the northern muriqui, dedicating her life to saving it and launching one of the world's longest-running primate studies. 

“I love everything about them; they’re beautiful animals, they’re graceful, they even smell good, like cinnamon,” the American primatologist told The Associated Press on a recent field trip. “It was a complete and total sensory experience that appealed to my mind as a scientist, and to my mind as a person.”