Olinguito - "New" Mammal Species

TheOnlineZoo

TheOnlineZoo

Well-Known Member
This may be old news to some of you, but I had not heard it before and a search of this forum yielded no results.

Adorable new mammal species found 'in plain sight'

Researchers announced Thursday a rare discovery of a new species of mammal called the olinguito.
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But the adorable olinguito (oh-lihn-GEE'-toe) shouldn't have been too hard to find. One of them lived in the Smithsonian-run National Zoo in the Washington for a year in a case of mistaken identity.
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The zoo's little critter, named Ringerl, was mistaken for a sister species, the olingo. Ringerl was shipped from zoo to zoo from 1967 to 1976: Louisville, Ky., Tucson, Ariz., Salt Lake City, Washington and New York City to try to get it to breed with other olingos.
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This is the best news I've heard all day. I've heard the olinquito mentioned on two BBC radio news programmes and it's on the front page of the BBC website: BBC - Homepage. I wonder how many people had heard of an olingo before today. I've seen olingos in two zoos: Kilverstone and Exmouth. A keeper at Kilverstone Zoo showed me one of the olingos just before the zoo was closing. He said that the adult pair had produced a son and daughter, but, as the zoo couldn't obtain more olingos, the mother had been put with the son and the father with the daughter. Zootierliste suggests that Kilverstone had two species of olingo at the time (Bassaricyon alleni and B. gabbii), so it is possible that the young olingos were hybrids.

I look forward to finding out more about the olinquito.
 
Having read this story with the same excitement as everyone else, I think that it does show the importance of taxidermy and having good people in a museum. I wonder what treasures might be gathering dust in the vast catacombs underneath the Natural History Museum in South Kensington?
 
Hello Ian

The PM programme on Radio 4 said about pressures on museum collections and that if the collection of skins at Chicago's Field Museum had been phased out, the discovery of the olinquito may have been further delayed.

http://inthecapital.streetwise.co/2...of-new-rare-mammal-the-olinguito-or-cat-bear/ says that the olinquito has been called the 'cat bear' - I can foresee confusion with the red panda and perhaps the binturong or bear cat.

I suspect that there are new species of mammals in the collection at the Natural History Musaeum, but I wonder if any staff members are available to check. The Darwin Centre has a cylindrical flask full of solenodons and a few other oddities, while the warehouse at Wandsworth has a range of specimens. The visitors to the collection were allowed to touch stuffed specimens. I chose the crescent nail-tailed wallaby and the ribbon seal.
 
And to think it spent time here at my own Reid Park Zoo! (That was before I lived here, so no chance I saw it).
 
The news has caused a Colombian research team to email photos of their local olingo group to check whether they might be olinguitos, and indeed they are. The article includes the first photo of a baby olinguito:

Meet the BABY olinguito
 
I've been wracking my brain for a few days over this. What was the mammal described in Handbook of Mammals Vol. 1 that was new to science?
 
Cant think of anything "new " in that volume[perhaps the Clouded Leopard split?] but in vol 3[the most recent one] they did "disallow" Pseudopotto martini with the revelation that the only complete specimen[a female] had lived in Zurich Zoo-which just goes to show that the obvious-as in the case of the Olinguito -is sometimes under our noses.
 
Just found the reference (on Wikipedia of all places). The Olinguito is mentioned in HBMW1.
 
jbnbsn99 said:
The Olinguito is mentioned in HBMW1.
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That's right; though the name 'Olinguito' wasn't used, nor was it formally named in HBMW1. I think they called it the Andean Olingo 'Bassaricyon sp.'
The species was known to exist, but hadn't at that time been given a scientific name.
 
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