with Cheirogaleus. Adoption of Mirza was slow, though in 1994 it was used in the first edition of Lemurs of Madagascar by Conservation International. In 1993, primatologist Colin Groves initially favored the Microcebus classification in the second edition of Mammal Species of the World, but began supporting the resurrection of Mirza in 2001. In 1991, prior to adopting Mirza, Groves was the first to use the common name "giant mouse lemur". Prior to that, they were popularly referred to as "Coquerel's mouse lemur". In 2005, Peter M. Kappeler and Christian Roos described a new species of giant mouse lemur, the northern giant mouse lemur (M. zaza). Their studies compared the morphology, behavioral ecology, and mitochondrial cytochrome b sequences of specimens from both Kirindy Forest in central-western Madagascar and around Ambato in northwestern Madagascar, part of the Sambirano valley. Their study demonstrated distinct differences in size, sociality, and breeding, as well as sufficient genetic distance to merit specific distinction between the northern and central-western populations. Because Grandidier's description was based on a southern specimen, they named the northern population as a new species. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) announced in 2010 that a biodiversity study from 2009 in the gallery forest of Ranobe near Toliara in southwestern Madagascar revealed a population of giant mouse lemurs previously unknown to science, and possibly a new species. They noted a significant difference in coloration between the two known species and the specimen they observed. However, further testing was required to confirm the discovery. Etymology The etymology of Mirza puzzled researchers for many years. Gray often created mysterious and unexplained taxonomic names—a trend continued with his description of not only Mirza in 1870, but also the genera Phaner (fork-marked lemurs) and Azema (for M. rufus, now a synonym for Microcebus), both of which were described in the same publication. In 1904, American zoologist Theodore Sherman Palmer attempted to document the etymologies of all mammalian taxa, but could not definitively explain these three genera. For Mirza, Palmer only noted that it derived from the Persian title mîrzâ ("prince"), a view tentatively supported by Alex Dunkel, Jelle Zijlstra, and Groves in 2012. However, because the reference to Persian princes might have come from Arabian Nights, a popular piece of literature at the time, Dunkel et al. also searched the general literature published around 1870. The origin of all three names was found in a British