A flange is also a collective noun for baboons.
"Citation needed!" I hear you cry.
No, really, it is. Look it up. Any list of collective nouns will have in it troop, congress, or flange for baboons. It is entirely legitimate to say that the alpha male of the particular group is the leader of the flange. Or that there was a flange of baboons making noise outside your tent. The term was popularised by an episode of Not the Nine O'clock News in 1980 in which a professor of zoology was being interviewed with his gorilla Gerald (this was at the time when Koko the Gorilla was purportedly being able to be taught language) and the gorilla keeps butting in to correct him including that it's a whoop of gorillas, but a flange of baboons. This became popular enough with real life zoologists that they adopted it.
So, it's now a flange of baboons because Mel Smith and Rowan Atkinson made a joke over 40 years ago.
This isn't the first time actual academic or scientific terms have gained traction from comedies or jokes. The great Glenn T. Seaborg discovered plutonium and proposed Pu as its chemical symbol because he thought it was funny to have it sound like "poo." The spines on the rear of a stegosaurus's tail are actually known as the thagomizer after a Far Side comic claimed as much. There is a protein in the brain synthesised by the sonic hedgehog gene because all the other genes which have that function are named after hedgehogs and some wag thought it was amusing to propose a blue fast thing from the then popular console game. So it's not unprecedented.
(IN24/16)