More than this: Western lowland gorillas. Photo: Thomas Breuer/Wildlife Conservation Society-Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Conservation biologists used to think that there are perhaps 110,000 western lowland gorillas, which live in seven countries of equatorial Africa. But when scientists with the Wildlife Conservation Society (best known for running the Bronx Zoo) combed an area of 18,000 square miles of rainforest and isolated swamps in the Republic of Congo and counted gorilla "nests," they reported at the International Primatological Society Congress in Edinburgh, they came up with a population estimate that essentially doubles the known population of western lowland gorillas. (Gorillas construct nests each night from leaves and branches for sleeping.) In some patches of forest, there were eight gorillas per square kilometer, one of the highest densities ever recorded.

Western lowland gorillas are one of four gorilla sub-species, the others being mountain gorillas, Cross River gorillas and eastern lowland gorillas. The first two are classified as “critically endangered” by the IUCN, and the last as endangered.

Seventy three thousand of the newly-discovered gorillas are in the Ntokou-Pikounda region, and 52,000 around Ndoki-Likouala, including nearly 6,000 in an isolated Raphia swamp. WCS credits the Republic of Congo’s long-term conservation management for the gorillas’ survival, including setting aside protected areas such as the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park and the Lac Tele Community Reserve. But the remoteness and inaccessibility of the gorilla lands clearly are key to the survival of this species, which is elsewhere endangered by habitat destruction from, in particular, logging both legal and illegal, which opens up remote regions (as a result of road building) to illegal hunting. Thousands of the newly-found gorillas live outside protected areas.

“Northern Republic of Congo contains the mother lode of gorillas,” said Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, WCS’s President and CEO. “It also shows that conservation in the Republic of Congo is working. This discovery should be a rallying cry for the world that we can protect other vulnerable and endangered species.”

It also makes you wonder, what else is out there in remote regions of the world? Years ago I wrote a few stories about cryptozoology, the search for and study of creatures unknown to science. Yes, there were the predictable reports of Bigfoot and Nessie, but the respectable core of the discipline is the idea that even in an era when it seems no place is innocent of the human foot print, there are still undiscovered places—and beasts. And now we know about another 125,000 of them.