Shrews belong to a famously diverse mammalian family, Soricidae. One genus, Crocidura, contains more than 180 species. A team of scientists from the US, Indonesia, and Australia have now added to this insectivore’s ranks, publishing a paper last month in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History that details 14 new Crocidura species on Sulawesi, an island in Indonesia. According to a Louisiana State University news release, this is the “largest number of new mammals described in a scientific paper since 1931.”
The team conducted a decade-long survey that examined a total of 1,368 shrews. Based on the animals’ physical characteristics and genomes, the team concluded there are 21 species of shrew endemic to Sulawesi, 14 of which were previously unidentified. The authors write in their paper that the diversity of shrew species on Sulawesi is almost three times what has been observed on any other island in ...
