San Diego

The future of the Duke University Primate Center in Durham, North Carolina, considered by evolutionary biologists to be unique and irreplaceable, is hanging in the balance. Administrators at Duke University could decide within a month not to seek a new permanent director and to phase the animal centre out of existence.

The decision will come at the end of an 18-month review period triggered by criticism that the facility had too many animals but carried out too little research. Duke officials sought to reorient the centre towards teaching and research, rather than conservation, and Duke officials say that it has improved. The colony has fallen from a peak of more than 600 animals to about 250, following the introduction of tight reproductive controls and a move to donate excess animals to zoos.

The Duke centre is home to the world's primary research colony of living prosimians, a branch of primates that evolved 50 million years before apes and monkeys. Often dubbed 'living fossils', the centre's prosimians, mostly lemurs, provide researchers with an unmatched resource for studying aspects of early primate evolution, from blood chemistry to morphology. “The centre is a gem beyond compare,” says Anne Yoder, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Elwyn Simons, a palaeontologist at Duke, says that about 50 projects studying living lemurs are under way, with about 40 projects involving the facility's prosimian fossil collection. “We are very impressed with the ramping up of research,” says Jim Siedow, Duke's vice-provost for research.

The facility, which was created in the 1960s and has an annual operating budget of about $1.2 million, could probably not be duplicated because some prosimian species are now endangered. Lemurs live in the wild only in Madagascar, where they are on the brink of extinction.