After years of sleuthing, Smithsonian scientists have come up with a new species of mammal — the olinguito.
The rust-colored, furry mammal lives in the treetops of the Andes Mountains and weighs 2 pounds, making it the most petite member of the raccoon family. It dines on fruits such as figs but also enjoys insects and plant nectar, according to the Smithsonian Institution, which announced the discovery yesterday.
The olinguito is the first new species of carnivore found in the Western Hemisphere in 35 years. Finding a new mammal, especially a carnivore, is rare.
For decades, scientists thought the mammal was an olingo, a larger member of the raccoon family, or another mammal. The animals had been observed in the wild, tucked away in museum collections and even exhibited at zoos, including the National Zoo.
“In some ways, this animal was hiding in plain sight,” said zoologist Roland Kays of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who helped discover the olinguito. Its pelts and bones were found stashed away in dusty museum drawers, either mislabeled or not labeled at all.
The animal puzzled zookeepers because it oddly refused to breed or mingle with other olingos.
“They thought it was just a fussy olingo, but turns out it was completely the wrong species,” said Smithsonian zoologist Kristofer Helgen, who spearheaded the sleuthing on the olinguito, which is Spanish for “little olingo.”
Although olinguitos have been spotted in the cloud forests of the northern Andes — in rain forests at elevations of 5,000 to 9,000 feet above sea level — scientists speculate the animals also might live elsewhere in Central and South America.
Helgen initially went museum-digging because he was determined to find out how many species of the olingo existed. At the Field Museum of Chicago, what he found in a drawer stopped him dead in his tracks.
The reddish-orange pelts he saw were nothing like the skins of the olingos. Searching further, he learned that the anatomy of the skull was different — shorter snout, dissimilar teeth.
“I knew at that point it was a new species, but I also knew I needed to be sure,” Helgen said. For years, he worked to confirm that the olinguito was a new species with thorough investigation and DNA testing, always afraid that another scientist would beat him to the punch.
Finally, he called upon Kays, the world’s resident olingo expert, to help him track down a wild olinguito in its natural habitat. The researchers, along with Ecuadorian zoologist Miguel Pinto, set off on a weeks-long field expedition to the Andean cloud forests.
Amid the misty treetops and giant tomato-sized figs, the team spotted one the first night.
“It sort of bounced around the trees almost like a monkey,” Kays said, “doing its thing, eating the figs.”