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First footage captured of African golden cat hunting

The African golden cat was first captured in photographs in 2002 and first appeared on film in 2011.

By Ben Hooper
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KIBALE NATIONAL PARK, Uganda, Jan. 29 (UPI) -- A team of scientists who set a trap camera to record primates in a Uganda national park said they captured the first-ever video of a hunting African golden cat.

Wild cat conservation organization Panthera said the African golden cat, a species that wasn't even photographed in the wild until 2002, was caught on camera hunting a group of red colobus monkeys while they were feeding on the dead wood of a tree stump at Kibale National Park.

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The footage was captured by a trap cam set by Samuel Angedakin, Kibale project manager for the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology's Pan African Program "The Cultured Chimpanzee," in collaboration with the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology.

A second video, by Yasuko Tashiro of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, recorded an African golden cat sleeping in a tree at Uganda's Kalinzu Forest Reserve. The footage shows the cat being harassed by monkeys until it descends the tree.

The elusive African golden cats have rarely been observed in the wild and most of the photographs taken of the animals were snapped by remote traps or were taken of dead specimens.

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The golden cat first appeared on video in 2011 in footage taken by Panthera's Kaplan Scholar, Laila Bahaa-el-din, in Gabon.

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