The Pygmy Chimpanzee (Pan paniscus) is the last species of anthropoid primates to have emerged in the eyes of the Western public. In this paper, I try to understand how it started to exist in the mind of the scientific community, and how it passed dynamically through different fields, arousing new questions and generative hypothesis. All along this study, I encounter different agents of webs weaved around the “discovery” of the Pygmy Chimpanzee and I try to demonstrate under which types of knowledge and with which attributes, it has little by little entered the western scientific discourse. This historical and anthropological approach of the Pygmy Chimpanzee should lead us to a better understanding of a “primatology in progress”, the relationship between primatology and Western colonial politics, and the importance of natural history collections in primatology.