The ring-tailed lemur was emaciated and suffering from advanced tuberculosis by the time she was turned over to the rescue facility in southwestern Madagascar in April 2019. An alarming, golf ball-size mass protruded from the left side of her neck.

She’d almost certainly “been living as a pet at someone’s house and contracted tuberculosis from sharing food, dishes, or air with an infected human,” says Marni LaFleur, an anthropologist at the University of San Diego, in California, who was part of a team that documented the case. Their findings appear in the latest issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Despite efforts to save the lemur, she died three months later. She was less than a year old, but