Bonobo Footprint

Whenever I held a bonobo or chimpanzee at the Kinshasa clinic for treatment, I looked at ways to take measurements as well as identify individuals. One of my first experiments was using watercolor painted on the bottoms of the hands and feet to get prints. I noted also the amount of webbing between the toes, a common finding in bonobos.

The watercolor was too thin to give good results, and the first attempts only gave information on relative size of the extremities.