Scientists have filmed an ancient egg-laying mammal named after Sir David Attenborough for the first time, proving it isn’t extinct as was feared.
An expedition to Indonesia led by Oxford University researchers recorded four three-second clips of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna.
Spiky, furry and with a beak, echidnas have been called “living fossils”.
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Previous expeditions had struggled to reach the parts of the Cyclops Mountains where the echidnas live because of the belief of local Papuans that they are sacred.
“The mountains are referred to as the landlady,” Madeleine Foote from Oxford University says. “And you do not want to upset the landlady by not taking good care of her property.”
This team worked closely with local villages and on a practical level that meant accepting that there were some places they couldn’t go to, and others where they passed through silently.
See Also: https://phys.org/news/2023-11-elusive-attenborough-echidna-rediscovered-indonesia.html
Among the more unusual findings was a new kind of tree-dwelling shrimp.
“We were quite shocked to discover this shrimp in the heart of the forest,” said Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou, the team’s lead entomologist, theorizing that the region’s heavy rainfall creates an environment humid enough for the shrimps to live on land.
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Scientists have filmed an ancient egg-laying mammal named after Sir David Attenborough for the first time, proving it isn’t extinct as was feared.
Dr Kempton, a biologist from Oxford University, headed a multi-national team on the month-long expedition traversing previously unexplored stretches of the Cyclops Mountains, a rugged rainforest habitat 2,000m (6,561ft) above sea level.
In addition to finding Attenborough’s “lost echidna” the expedition discovered new species of insects and frogs, and observed healthy populations of tree kangaroo and birds of paradise.
That has meant that for the last 62 years the only evidence that Attenborough echidna ever existed has been a specimen kept under high security in the Treasure Room of Naturalis, the natural history museum of the Netherlands.
To an untrained eye it’s not dissimilar to a squashed hedgehog because when it was first gathered by Dutch botanist Pieter van Royen it wasn’t stuffed.
To reach the highest elevations, where the echidna are found, the scientists had to climb narrow ridges of moss and tree roots - often under rainy conditions - with sheer cliffs on either side.
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Land Shrimp/Forest Shrimp. That’s a new one for me.
