Thomas Defler
Thomas R. Defler is a North American primatologist who lives and works in Colombia.
He earned his PhD from the University of Colorado at Denver in 1976 and then he moved to Colombia. Defler worked in eastern Colombia, in the Llanos until 1984 and then in the Amazonian Vaupés Department where he developed and lived in his research station, Estación Biológica Caparú until 1998 when he was obligated to flee from his research station by FARC guerrillas. He had run a primate rehabilitation center in Vaupes. He is the author of many papers about primates and of the books Primates de Colombia, Primates of Colombia and Historia Natural de los Primates Colombianos . He also edited a monograph on woolly monkeys.
Currently, he heads another Amazonian research station that he has developed in the southern Colombian Amazon, Estación Ecológica Omé, that is affiliated with the National University of Colombia and he teaches at the Bogotá campus of the same university. He and the Colombian biologist Marta Bueno are credited with first describing Hernández-Camacho's night monkey in 2007. Together with Javier Garcia, he led an expedition in which they discovered and described a new species of titi monkey, the Caquetá titi. Using karyotypes, Defler has done work clarifying the taxonomy of various species of night monkey. He has done field studies in the Colombian llanos and the Colombian Amazon on the white-fronted capuchin, the brown woolly monkey, the black-headed uakari, the black titi, the Lucifer titi, and the Venezuelan red howler and has accomplished many primate censuses in different parts of eastern Colombia.
