A lap-sized critter that looks like a mix between a raccoon and a teddy bear was unveiled on Thursday as the first new carnivore in the western hemisphere in 35 years.
Scientists say the olinguito has actually been around for ages, in zoos, museums and in the forests of Ecuador and Colombia, but was mistaken for its larger cousin, the olingo.
A big clue that this tree-crawling animal was something unusual was that it never wanted to breed with the olingo, experts said.
Photo: AFP / Mark Gurney / Smithsonian
The new species, named Bassaricyon neblina, is now understood to be the smallest member of the same family as raccoons, kinkajous and olingos. With wide, round eyes and tiny claws that help it cling to branches, the olinguito can jump between trees. It feasts mainly on fruit, but also eats insects.
Its discovery, which took a decade of research, is described in Thursday’s edition of the journal ZooKeys.
As part of the journey, scientists realized that museum specimens of the olinguito had been collected from higher elevations — 1,500m to 2,700m above sea level — in the Andes Mountains than olingos were known to inhabit.
DNA analysis was also done to differentiate the olinguitos from their cousins. The olinguito was smaller, with a differently shaped head and teeth. Its orange-brown coat was also longer and denser.
And when researchers took to the South American forests to see if the creatures were still around in the wild, they were not disappointed.
They found plenty of olinguitos in the cloud forests of the western Andes, and noted that the creatures are active at night. The 1kg animals also appear to prefer staying in the trees and have one baby at a time instead of several.
“The cloud forests of the Andes are a world unto themselves, filled with many species found nowhere else, many of them threatened or endangered,” said Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “We hope that the olinguito can serve as an ambassador species for the cloud forests of Ecuador and Colombia, to bring the world’s attention to these critical habitats.”
Helgen and his fellow researchers on the project estimate that 42 percent of historic olinguito habitat has already been converted to agriculture or urban areas.
There are four sub-species of the olinguito, and they are not being classified as endangered. Experts believe there must be many thousands of them, possibly even in Venezuela and Peru.
At least one olinguito from Colombia was exhibited in several zoos in the US during the 1960s and 1970s, researchers said.
Back in the 1920s, a zoologist in New York was said to have found the olinguito so unusual that he thought it might be a new species, but he did not publish any research to document the discovery.
“Proving that a species exists and giving it a name is where everything starts,” Helgen said.
“This is a beautiful animal, but we know so little about it. How many countries does it live in? What else can we learn about its behavior? What do we need to do to ensure its conservation?” he said.
According to the Smithsonian, the most recent new meat-eating mammal found in the Western Hemisphere was the Colombian weasel in 1978.
A mongoose-like carnivorous mammal that is native to Madagascar was found in 2010.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema