The saddest thing about the discovery of a mysterious new mammal on the forest paths of Borneo, is that the creature itself will never know how rare, endangered and exciting to the world's media it is. If the creature, possibly a carnivore not previously known to world science, photographed loping through the darkness, advancing then retreating, its eyes glowing like carriage lamps, had been Colleen McLoughlin putting out the rubbish one night, she would probably have measured the impact of the sighting over the following days at the newsagent's.
But the nameless little beast scampering through the Kalimantan leafmould is unselfconscious about its rarity and feels neither the loneliness nor the isolation which the human world has projected onto it. It just wanted to vanish back into the obscurity from which it was plucked by a World Wide Fund for Nature paparazzo. Relentlessly, one by one, under the banner of protecting the world's wide places, scientists and conserva-tionists are stripping the mystery from these very places by exposing the last unknown mammals.
The existence of what may, or may not, be the latest in a string of new mammals to have been discovered in the last decade was announced in Jakarta last week.
As with many of the previous discoveries, the evidence is, at least at first, indirect -- not the animal itself, captured or seen by a scientist, but two blurry photographs showing, first, a skinny scurrier like a wingless bat with a long fat tail, its muzzle obscured by a leaf, and second, the same creature from behind, with haunches like a monkey and a tail like a well-fed ginger tom.
If past discoveries, such as the Vietnamese otter-civet or the Borneo ferret-badger are a guide, the newbie may come to be known as the cat-dog-fox-monkey-lemur. Then again, the head of the team which discovered it goes by the name of Stephen Wulffraat, so it could, in theory, end up being named after him.
Dr Wulffraat's mobile in Indonesia wasn't working when we tried to call and his fellow mammal-hunters were, in the main, all deep in far wooded places where telecommunications are only a rumor.
Ginette Hemley of the World Wide Fund for Nature, which along with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has been the main organization backing the scientists who have discovered new mammals, was cautious about the new creature's identity.
"This is potentially a new species," she said. "It has not been confirmed. Doing that will require physical evidence we do not yet have."
The WWF's next stage is to catch one.
If there appears to be a degree of urgency in the WWF's mammal- hunting team, it's because time is not on their side. Earlier this year the Indonesian authorities, with the backing of a Chinese bank, announced a multi-billion-dollar plan to plant oil palms in the high mountain forests where the mystery beast lives.
The WWF is sceptical about the project -- oil palms do not grow well at high altitude and there are other areas of Borneo which would appear to be more suitable. The organization suspects a grab attempt for the old-growth timber on the high ridges.
"We're not opposed to an oil palm plantation being developed, as long as it's done in a way that is not going to harm biodiversity," Hemley says.
Incredibly, the Borneo cat-dog-fox-monkey-lemur may be the third previously unknown mammal discovered this year. In a hunter's market in central Laos, a WCS researcher, Robert Timmins, came across a short-legged rodent with a hairy tail and a long snout, as if it started out as a rat, toyed with guinea pigness, and ended up as a squirrel. In this case, "previously unknown" is strictly a culturally relative term. The animal was on sale along with some vegetables, and was well enough known by local Laotians to have a name: the kha-nyou.
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