2023-11-11 01:16:00
They are believed to have emerged regarding 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but one had never been seen alive until now.
The Attenborough long-beaked echidna is an egg-laying mammal that was feared extinct and was named following British naturalist David Attenborough.
The images of the animal were captured by an expedition led by researchers from the University of Oxford that managed to record three-second clips of a long-beaked echidna with hidden cameras.
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These animals with spikes, fur and beaks have been described as “living fossils.”
Until now, the only proof of the existence of this species was a specimen of a dead animal that has been in a museum for decades.
“I was elated, the whole team was elated,” Dr James Kempton told BBC News of the moment he saw Attenborough’s echidna in footage from one of the expedition’s cameras.
“I’m not kidding when I say it was on the last memory card we looked at, from the last camera we picked up, on the last day of our expedition,” he explained, still in disbelief.
The echidna is, apart from the platypus, the only mammal that lays eggs.
Attenborough’s weevil echidna.
Of the four echidna species, three have long beaks, and two of them, the Attenborough echidna and the western echidna, are considered critically endangered.
Kempton, a biologist at the University of Oxford, traveled for a month with a team made up of scientists from different countries to unexplored areas of the Cyclops Mountains, a steep jungle habitat located 2,000 meters above sea level in Indonesia.
As well as finding Attenborough’s “lost echidna”, the expedition discovered new species of insects and frogs, and observed healthy populations of tree kangaroos and birds of paradise.
But there is no doubt that the highlight of the expedition was observing the echidna in its habitat.
Previous expeditions to the Cyclopean Mountains had discovered signs of their existence, such as nose marks in the ground.
But they were unable to access the most remote areas of the mountains and provide definitive proof of their existence.
That has meant that for the last 62 years the only proof that Attenborough’s echidna existed was a specimen preserved in the Treasure Room of Naturalis, the natural history museum of the Netherlands.
“It’s quite flat,” says Pepijn Kamminga, Naturalis collection director, as he shows it off.
To the untrained eye, it looks like a squashed hedgehog, because when it was first collected by Dutch botanist Pieter van Royen it was not stuffed.
The importance of the specimen was not clear until 1998, when x-rays revealed that it was not another species of echidna, but an adult specimen and different from Attenborough’s.
It was then that the species was named in honor of David Attenborough.
“When it was discovered, people thought that maybe it was already extinct because it was the only one,” Kamminga explains. “So this [el redescubrimiento] “It’s incredible news.”
Source: BBC.
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