‘Olinguito’ is first carnivorous mammal found in the western hemisphere in 35 years

Say 'Hi' to the Olinguito (pronounced oh-lin-GHEE-toe).

This newly-discovered species, described in a press release as being "a cross between a house cat and a teddy bear", lives in the cloud forests along the Andes Mountains in Colombia and Ecuador. It's now one of four known sub-species of Olingo (a species related to the raccoon), and the olinguito is the first carnivorous species discovered in the western hemisphere in 35 years. The last one found was the Colombian weasel, in 1978.

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This isn't the first time that members of this species have been seen, though. Over the ten years of work conducted leading up to today, the leader of the study that identified the olinguito, Kristofer Helgen, discovered bone and fur specimens in several museum collections, noting differences in the size and shape of the teeth and skulls, and especially the stark contrast of their fur to the grey-coloured fur of the other known olingo species.

"At the Chicago Field Museum, I pulled out a drawer, and there were these stunning, reddish-brown long-furred skins," said Helgen, according to the Smithsonian. "They stopped me in my tracks — they weren't like any olingo that had been seen or described anywhere."

Spending the next decade tracking down the olinguito, he found even more specimens in museum collections, and discovered that one from Colombia was even on display in several zoos in the United States through the 1960s and 1970s. However, all of these animals were misidentified as one of the other olingo species. According to the Smithsonian, one zoologist back in the 1920s saw a museum specimen and thought it might be a different species, but he never follow up.

No other examples or sightings were reported otherwise, but they got lucky when they received a video from a colleague in Ecuador named Miguel Pinto, which showed a few grainy seconds of footage of one of these elusive animals. This prompted Helgen and Roland Kays, from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, to head off on a three-week expedition to the Ecuador cloud forests to see one for themselves. Documenting everything they could about the specimens, they found that they're usually up and about at night, they mostly eat fruit (but is also a meat-eater), and they only rarely comes down out of the trees they call home.

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"The discovery of the olinguito shows us that the world is not yet completely explored, its most basic secrets not yet revealed," Helgen said in the press release. "If new carnivores can still be found, what other surprises await us? So many of the world's species are not yet known to science. Documenting them is the first step toward understanding the full richness and diversity of life on Earth."

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