Scientists in the US have discovered a new animal living in the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador. It has been named olinguito and is the first new species of carnivore to be identified in the Western hemisphere in 35 years. It has taken more than a decade to identify the mammal, a discovery that scientists say is incredibly rare in the 21st Century. The credit goes to a team from the Smithsonian Institution. The trail began when zoologist Kristofer Helgen uncovered some bones and animal skins in storage at a museum in Chicago. Dr Helgen is curator of mammals at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, which houses the largest mammal collection in the world. More than 600,000 specimens are flat-packed in trays to save space, their bones picked clean by specially bred beetles and stored in boxes alongside their skins.
The 35cm-long (14in) olinguito is the latest addition to the animal family that includes racoons. By comparing DNA samples with the other five known species, Dr Helgen was able to confirm his discovery. "The olinguito is a carnivore - that group of mammals that includes cats, dogs and bears and their relatives. Many of us believed that list was complete, but this is a new carnivore - the first to be found on the American continent for more than three decades." Dr Helgen has used such mammal collections to identify many other new species, including the world's biggest bat and the world's smallest bandicoot. But he says the olinguito is his most significant discovery. Its scientific name is Bassaricyon neblina. The last carnivore to be identified in the Americas was the Colombian Weasel.
The olinguito is now known to inhabit a number of protected areas from Central Colombia to western Ecuador. Although it is a carnivore, it eats mainly fruit, comes out at night and lives by itself, producing just one baby at a time.
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