Posts tagged as:

discovery

Newly Described Mammals Week: Bornean Clouded Leopard (Neofelis diardi)

by JR Kinyak on February 18, 2008

in Carnivores,Theme Weeks

click image to enlarge

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Hi, mammals! I’ve learned many things since I started on my quest to draw every mammal species on earth. The most recent: business trips and a daily drawing blog just don’t mix. I’ve been traveling a lot the past few weeks—a whole lot—and it doesn’t look to let up until this summer. Sometimes that means I don’t get to draw; sometimes that means I can’t post my drawings. Please stick with me, though: I’m just as committed to this goal as ever, and your visits, comments, and general support mean the world to me!

This cat is an example of another way new mammal species are “discovered.” Science has known about the clouded leopards that live on Borneo and Sumatra for quite a while, but always thought they were the same species as the clouded leopards that live elsewhere in southeast Asia. A scientist quoted in The Daily Mail, though, had a different idea:

“The moment we started comparing the skins of the mainland clouded leopard with the leopard found on Borneo, it was clear we were comparing two different species.

“It’s incredible that no one has ever noticed these differences.”

Isn’t it, though? DNA testing confirmed that not only were the two kinds of leopard completely different species, they were, all the articles point out, as different from each other as lions are from tigers. The new species was officially described in 2007.

I suppose scientists are busy people, and no one had bothered to really think about this particular cat and whether it was a subspecies or a species or just slightly darker in color because of geographical variance or what. But clouded leopards were first described in 1821, the Bornean subspecies in 1823. That’s nearly 200 years, people!

Science Daily: “New Species Declared: Clouded Leopard on Borneo and Sumatra“

Tagged as: cat, discovery, dna, taxonomy

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Newly Described Mammals Week: Gray-Faced Sengi (Rhynchocyon udzungwensis)

by JR Kinyak on February 15, 2008

in Other Orders,Theme Weeks

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In 2005, scientists studying giant elephant-shrews (another name for sengis) in Tanzania set a camera trap that caught (on film) a creature they weren’t expecting. Long-snouted and furry, it looked a lot like the black-and-rufous sengi, only bigger and with a gray face and a black behind. Sure enough, it turned out to be a brand-new species, first described in a scientific journal in 2006. It’s the first new sengi species to be found in the last 126 years.

The gray-faced sengi is the largest (known) sengi. It lives in a very small forested area of Tanzania’s mountains. Sengis were originally thought to be related to shrews, but now scientists seem to think they are actually related to elephants, aardvarks, and sea cows! Amazing! I think they’re beautiful and I love to draw their colors. I hope science finds many more of these guys in the next 14 years.

Conservation International: “Scientists Discover New Species of Giant Elephant-Shrew”
California Academy of Sciences: “A new species of giant sengi (genus Rhynchocyon)”

Tagged as: discovery, shrew, taxonomy

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Newly Described Mammals Week: Pygmy Three-Toed Sloth (Bradypus pygmaeus)

by JR Kinyak on February 14, 2008

in Other Orders,Theme Weeks

click image to enlarge
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This week, or for the next week, I should say, I’ll be highlighting mammals “discovered” in the 21st century. (More often than not, people who live where the mammals in question do have known about them forever; it’s scientists to whom the species are new, so I’m trying to use the word described rather than discovered where I can.)

Did you know that 95 percent of all animal species in the world are invertebrates? That means that the animals the average person actually considers animals—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians—make up only 5 percent of all the species on earth. Even though there are relatively very, very few mammal species to discover, even now, scientists haven’t found them all. (At least, I assume they haven’t. Maybe the GoldenPalace.com monkey will turn out to be one of the last mammals the scientific community finds. By the way, if you’re hoping we can avoid calling it the GoldenPalace.com monkey by using its scientific name, no dice: it’s Latin for “of the golden palace.”)

The pygmy three-toed sloth was first described in 2001. It lives in Panama and is, as you’d suspect, a smaller relative of the three-toed sloths we’ve met before on the Daily Mammal. Like its cousins, it sleeps three quarters of the day, moves very slowly, swims like a champ, and, I just now learned, has fur covered with algae to camouflage it in the forest. Pygmy three-toed sloths are very endangered; I suppose we should be grateful we got to meet them at all.

The pygmy three-toed sloth on ARKive
The documentary Hanging with the Sloths

Tagged as: discovery, sloth, taxonomy

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