CITES Appendix I, which prohibits commercial trade. Despite breeding easily, they are rarely kept in captivity. The Duke Lemur Center coordinated the captive breeding of an imported collection of the northern species, which rose from six individuals in 1982 to 62 individuals by 1989, but the population fell to six by 2009 and was no longer considered a breeding population. Taxonomy The first species of giant mouse lemur was described by the French naturalist Alfred Grandidier in 1867 based on seven individuals he had collected near Morondava in southwestern Madagascar. Of these seven specimens, the lectotype was selected in 1939 as MNHN 1867–603, an adult skull and skin. Naming the species after the French entomologist Charles Coquerel, Grandidier placed Coquerel's giant mouse lemur (M. coquereli) with the dwarf lemurs in the genus Cheirogaleus (which he spelled Cheirogalus) as C. coquereli. He selected this generic assignment based on similarities with fork-marked lemurs (Phaner), which he considered to also be members of Cheirogaleus. The following year, the German naturalist Hermann Schlegel and Dutch naturalist François Pollen independently described the same species and coincidentally gave it the same specific name, coquereli, basing theirs on an individual from around the Bay of Ampasindava in northern Madagascar. Unlike Grandidier, they placed their specimen in the genus Microcebus (mouse lemurs); however, these authors also listed all Cheirogaleus under Microcebus and based the classification of their species on similarities with the greater dwarf lemur (M. typicus, now C. major). In 1870, the British zoologist John Edward Gray placed Coquerel's giant mouse lemur into its own genus, Mirza. This classification was widely ignored and later rejected in the early 1930s by zoologists Ernst Schwarz, Guillaume Grandidier, and others, who felt that its longer fur and bushy tail did not merit a separate genus and instead placed it in Microcebus. British anatomist William Charles Osman Hill also favored this view in 1953, noting that despite its larger size (comparable to Cheirogaleus), its first upper premolar was proportionally small as in Microcebus. In 1977, French zoologist Jean-Jacques Petter also favored the Microcebus classification, despite the threefold size difference between Coquerel's giant mouse lemur and the other members of the genus. The genus Mirza was resurrected in 1982 by American paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall to represent an intermediate branch between Microcebus and Cheirogaleus, citing the Coquerel's giant mouse lemur's significantly larger size than the largest Microcebus and locomotor behavior more closely aligned