A curious new species

August 15, 2013 • 8:13 am

I just this minute got a “CNN breaking news alert”: this is it in its entirety:

Smithsonian announces new species called olinguito and describes it as cross between house cat and teddy bear.

(CNN usually reserves its “news alerts” for important world events.)

Well, what they mean is that this new creature looks like the offspring of a cross between a house cat and a teddy bear.  This is not a joke, and I’m curious to see what on earth this is. Readers can post updates below.

But I will relate a joke that my father used to tell me:

Dad: “What do you get when you cross a lion with a parrot”?
Jerry: “I don’t know, Dad.”
Dad: “I don’t know either, but when it talks, you’d better listen!”

Well, that’s a joke, but the olinguito apparently is not.

I’ll be here all week, folks.

UPDATE:  Here’s a photo of it, one of three from the BBC report:

69301447_2photoofolinguito

 

It’s described as the first new species of carnivore to be found in the Western hemisphere in 35 years. It resides in Colombia and Ecuador.

50 thoughts on “A curious new species”

  5. WaPo article

    “The animals had been … even exhibited at zoos — including the National Zoo.
    …
    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 M. Helgen, who spearheaded the sleuthing on the olinguito, which is Spanish for “little olingo.””

  9. Reminds me of the old joke, ‘I went to the zoo and all they had was a dog. It was a shitzu’

    1. and there is tons in the ocean still.

      I sent Jerry a link a couple of weeks back to a paper recently published on doing mass PCR and genome assembly of “unculturable” maritime bugs. If my reading of the paper (IANA-geneticist) is correct, they added on the order of 23 (or was it 29?) taxons of microbes at a level comparable to “phyla”, and did some deep re-ordering of the “tree of life”. To put that in context, this is an “early report” level of work, against around a hundred phyla previously erected for metazoans, plants and “microbes” (from Margulis & Schwartz’s “Five Kingdoms” book ; I still haven’t finished reading it, and the number of phyla had changed by several between publication and me ordering a copy!)
      It was pretty headache-inducing stuff. Where did I put that link …

      Subject : [WEIT] Microbial “Dark Matter”
      Body : It’s the paper’s title, not me! “Insights into the phylogeny and coding potential of microbial dark matter” NATURE, v499 p431.

      I shouldn’t really promote astrophysicists paddling in the murky lagoon of biology, but Tom Gold (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold) did have a point when he suggested that the “Deep Hot Biosphere” could be volumetrically the largest living space in/ on Earth. Whether there is sufficient organic (“CHONP”) matter to survive there in large quantities is a separate question. And mixing rates and environmental changes are likely to be slow, which would challenge evolutionary processes. But he does have some fair points, even if he is generally unlikely to be correct in his hypothesis.

      1. No, it’s definitely the description of a new species. This creature had never been formally named and described in detail, or ever classified for that matter.

        It would be a reclassification if it had been described and named but was treated perhaps as a subspecies of some other species, or had been classified in a group (perhaps a different genus) to which it was not closely related. This was overlooked because it was confused with another species, but that’s another sort of problem.

    1. This is a close relative of the coati, in the raccoon family (Procyonidae).

      Ah, so that’s what “Procyonids” are. I saw the picture and thought “Weasel?” ; and indeed, the paper does have the group of interest presented as a sister group to the Mustilidae.

          2. One thing’s for sure: this pun thread is going to badger us all until somebody ferrets out the truth. C’mon, guys — y’all otter know better by now!

            b&

  16. Did you hear about the guy who crossed Lassie with a Casaba? He wanted a melon-collie baby!

  17. It’s described as the first new species of carnivore to be found in the Western hemisphere in 35 years.

    Wow! It’s been hiding a long time since it got off the Ark!

    1. Wow! It’s been hiding a long time since it got off the Ark!

      Looking from the other end of the telescope … that Noah guy must have been one helluva taxonomist to get all those unidentified species lined up and paired off correctly.

  18. I worry about this animal because it’s being touted as “CUTE” which usually means the kiss of death. Let’s hope it has the disposition of a WOLVERINE, so mindless celebrity TWITS won’t be sporting one as a ”pet” and starting a fad.

    1. The good thing about “cute” is everyone wants to save it – everyone likes the koala bear but so many people don’t care about frogs or salamanders (which I just as cute IMHO).

      1. Worse yet, try to generate widespread concern about plants. What use are “weeds”? — they’re nothing but the foundation of terrestrial ecosystems.

  19. The worst thing that has happened to this little critter was to be “discovered”.

    1. Nope, that’s the best thing recently. There’s no hope of conserving what we don’t know. Can’t even get something listed as threatened or endangered until it’s been named and described.

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