Zira was a chimpanzee psychologist and veterinarian, who specialised in the study of humans, in the novel La Planète des singes. Zira was the fiancée of Cornélius, and both were ultimately responsible to Mi Zaïus. Her work involved both working with humans under laboratory conditions (e.g. learning and behavioural experiments), and working on them physically (lobotomy and other brain surgeries, vivisection, physical endurance and tolerance experiments, and subsequent autopsies). Having seen him demonstrate Pythagora's Thereom, Zira discovered that her charge Ulysse Mérou, caged in the laboratory of the Institute for Advanced Biological Study where she worked, wasn't a native-born, mute human of her planet, but a space traveller capable of speech, and she secretly taught him the language of