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.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the