Lemur is one of the mysterious creatures found predominately in equally mysterious island of Madagascar. Today this animal is being steadily pushed towards extinction as it tries to grapple with insurmountable challenges like loss of habitat and illegal hunting. Now biologists have come up with a unique solution that might turn up as a major boon for sustaining the population of Lemurs.

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Facial recognition. Yes, the same technology that is today widely used to identify and verify human beings will now be used to identify Lemurs. A team of lemur biologists and computer scientists have painstakingly developed facial recognition software that can recognize two different lemurs with 97 percent accuracy.

This software is been named LemurFaceID, which has been developed after collecting a vast amount of data including 462 images of 80 red-bellied lemurs and 190 images of other lemur species. Most of these photos were taken in Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar.

The LemurFaceID will easily help biologists in studying and examining an individual lemur for a longer period of time. This in-turn will help the scientific community to develop a long term conservation strategy for this endangered animal.

"Like humans, lemurs have unique facial characteristics that can be recognized by this system,"

In past, biologists often relied on "soft identifiers" like differences in body size and shape or the presence of injuries and scars to indentify and differentiate a particular Lemur from its counterpart. However, over the course of time this non-reliable method was proving to be a huge hindering factor in conducting an in-depth study.

What is equally great about LemurFaceID is that it offers more humane and non-invasive way to identify two set of lemurs. This means the animal will be recorded and monitored with minimal interference from biologists, which in-turn could bring down the costs.

Only time will tell us whether this unique facial recognition software will be able to help the Madagascar specialist animal in winning their survival battle? But this solution seems to have arrived at the most critical time when biologists are becoming increasingly concerned about the survival of lemurs.

A study claims that out of 50 species of Lemurs, 10 are already critically endangered, seven have been categorized as 'critically endangered' and 19 as 'vulnerable.'