Camera Trap captures HUGE families of Bili Apes and their activities (Male and Female!)

Researchers hiked through thousands of kilometers of untamed wilderness, dodging armed poachers, and rogue militants to find, photograph, and study one of the last remaining "mega-cultures" of chimpanzee.

The Bili Apes have been a backbone of the Cryptozoological community for a number of years now, even though genetic testing reveals them to be nothing spectacular in the terms of "new genetic finds." Due to their local lore of "lion killing" and "ground nesting," it's easy to see why many in the field of "You'll get nothing and like it" love to parade the find as a sort of crypto-esque find.

"This is one of the few places left on Earth with a huge continuous population of chimps," says Cleve Hicks, a primatologist based at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, who says the group is probably the largest in Africa. "We estimate many thousands of individuals, perhaps tens of thousands." A unique set of customs and behaviour is shared by the apes across a vast area of 50,000 sq km, revealing how they live naturally.

The unusually large chimps of the Bili-Uele forest have been seen feasting on leopard and build ground nests far more often than other chimps, as well as having a unique taste for giant African snails, whose shells they appear to pound open on rocks or logs. Motion-activated video cameras left in the forest for eight months also recorded gangs of males patrolling their territory and mothers showing their young how to use tools to eat swarming insects – although the footage did not confirm the lunar howls.

 The camera traps also revealed an extraordinary range of other forest dwellers, including forest elephants, olive baboons, spotted hyena as well as red river and giant forest hogs, crested guinea fowl and aardvark. "We saw incredible amounts of wildlife on our camera traps, but we did not catch a single film of a human," says Hicks. "It remains one of the last untouched wildernesses in Africa."

To view all of the AMAZING footage recovered from this expedition, head over to the LUKURU Foundation YouTube page CLICK HERE