SCIENCE MAY be dominated by men, but when it comes to the study of man's closest cousins, the great apes and primates, the majority of experts are female.

Role models such as Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas have inspired a generation of women to study the creatures. When leading primatologists gathered in Edinburgh last week for the 22nd meeting of the International Primate Society, the world's largest conference on monkeys and great apes, the dominance of female researchers in the field was obvious - of the 1200 delegates, about 70% were women.

"There are without doubt more women here than men and that is a fascinating phenomenon, because other sciences are still dominated by men, but it seems primatology is becoming a woman's field", said a spokeswoman for the organising committee of the conference.

"But that doesn't make this soft' science. It's tough out there working with these animals. There are theories about nurturing and women treating the primates like children, but they would get short shrift at this conference. We find such notions patronising and demeaning to what we do.

"I would put it down to the influences of the likes of Fossey, Goodall and Galdikas, rather than fluffy bunny rabbit syndrome. These three women represent the top of this game, plain and simple."

Goodall, now 74, said last year: "Women have an advantage in trying to understand animal behaviour because we must have an inbuilt ability to understand their wants and needs through non-verbal communication, in other words to understand our own babies before they can speak."

While dismissed as an amateur by some male academics in the 1960s, Goodall made one of the most important discoveries about chimpanzees - their ability to construct tools.

Carole Jahme, a British primatologist, claimed in her book Beauty and the Beasts that women become emotionally attached to the apes and gorillas they study and are suitable for pursuing long-term primate studies. Men, on the other hand, "publish papers, push their careers forward and move on" to stations in academia, she claimed.

She said: "Scientists are humans before they are scientists and we are all affected by our gender. Male primatologists have been concerned with the study of males and women with the female of the species.

"Women are more likely to understand the primates and are more likely to stick it out for research which can last decades as some of these animals can live up to 50 years in the wild."

While delegates were warned that many types of apes and monkeys are on the world's red list' of endangered species, better news was delivered by Emma Stokes of the New York-based World Conservation Society who discovered larger than expected numbers of lowland gorillas while conducting a census in the Republic of Congo.

The census found 125,000 of the apes alive and well in two adjacent areas in the northern part of the country. It had been thought that there were only around 50,000 left.