The newest carnivorous mammal, the olinguitoWIKIPEDIA, MARK GURNEY
A curator’s curiosity jumpstarted a 10-year journey that led from a collection of decades-old remains to the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador. Along the way, a new species of carnivorous mammal—the first identified in the Western Hemisphere since the Colombian weasel—was discovered. Named the olinguito, or Bassaricyon neblina, the new mammal had been mistaken for its close relative, the olingo, by zookeepers and museum curators for nearly a century. The finding was published Thursday (August 15) in ZooKeys.
Kristofer Helgen, the curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, found the collection of skin, skulls, and bones tucked away in a drawer at Chicago’s Field Museum. “It stopped me in my tracks,” he told BBC News. “The skins were a ...
