Otonga is located in Ecuador. Probably it is the most beautiful place that I have seen.
You can hear the drops of water just fall from the leaves and the branches.
You can see the orchids.
And suddenly, when you are walking you just hear this vroom, vroom, vroom, and those are
actually hummingbirds you cannot see because the mist is so dense.
It’ s the magical land of the olinguito—the first new species of Carnivora found in decades.
I am Miguel Pinto. I study mammals and mammalian parasites.
The olinguito is a new species that was discovered using museum collections.
The specimens here in the American Museum of Natural History were collected in the early
20th century, but they were not studied.
New species are very often found in the drawers of museum collections—basically hiding in
plain sight, amongst all the other material.
I’m Nancy Simmons. I’m the Curator-In-Charge of the Department of Mammalogy at the American
Museum of Natural History.
When researchers go out in the field and make general collections—and this happened a
lot back in the early 20th century—they would collect everything that they could.
Now, when that came back to the museum, there might be a specialist here who worked on the
rodents, somebody else might work on the carnivores, but maybe, for instance, the bats just got
filed away. So, only years later when somebody who’s interested and knowledgeable about
those particular species comes back and looks closely at them, they go, “Wow, there’s
something new here that nobody noticed when it first came into the collections.”
My name is Kristofer Helgen, and I’m a curator of mammals at the Smithsonian.
It was end of the year, 2003. I was working in the Chicago Field Museum, studying members
of the raccoon family. I pulled open a particular drawer, and I saw these red-orange pelts that
were so different from any other raccoon family member I’d ever seen. They stopped me in
my tracks. I pulled open some of the boxes of skulls that went along with those skins.
And all of a sudden I started to see differences in teeth and skulls.
And it occurred to me right there and then—could this be a kind of mammal that all other zoologists
had missed. And that’s where it all started.
I wanted to go to every museum in the world that could conceivably have these. This was
the second largest holding of these animals.
The museum data probably was enough to describe this new species. But we wanted more information.
We wanted to see if there were still living populations in the wild.
So, Kris organized a group of researchers. And so I got involved to go to the field and
find these guys. Looking at the data associated with the museum specimens, we could understand
more or less the kind of forest where the olinguitos were living.
I could say, “Well, Otonga might be a very good place for these animals.” So, I did
some scouting trips and it turned out to be the right place.
The first night in this forest, in Otonga, I could see the olinguito. Actually it was
jumping over my head on the branches. That was amazing.
When a researcher thinks they have a new species and wants to describe it in a formal way,
they need to pick out a holotype—that is a single, individual specimen that is going
to represent that species for all time.
A good holotype isn’t necessarily the prettiest or the biggest specimen.
In history, typically, male researchers often picked male holotypes. But really it doesn’t
matter. It can be either a male or a female. Ideally, a holotype is a complete specimen
of an animal. However, often holotypes are not complete. For instance, with fossils,
a holotype can be just a couple of teeth of an extinct animal.
We grapple with, you know, which specimen should be the type. With the olinguito because
our work in the field and our work with DNA was based on the Ecuador samples, we really
wanted to pick a type specimen from Ecuador. And so, the best one, that turned out to be
here at this museum. It’s been here a long time and we know it’ll always be here.
The olinguito is by no means the only holotype of a mammal in our collections. We have over
1200 type specimens here, of things ranging from bats and shrews to whales and elephants.
Holotypes are really important because new discoveries of species diversity are based
on comparisons to past species diversity.
With so much life on our planet, we’re constantly using these important reference points in
museums to sort out the variation and richness of life on Earth.
With the olinguito, visiting all these collections, analyzing all the data, and putting it all
together—I think that is great museum science. It’s such a rare privilege to describe a
new species and the olinguitos are just beautiful, beautiful animals.