They are believed to have emerged about 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but one had never been seen alive until now.
He Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna is an egg-laying mammal that was feared extinct and was named after British naturalist David Attenborough.
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The images of the animal were captured by an expedition led by researchers from the University of Oxford that managed to record three-second clips of a long-beaked echidna with hidden cameras.
These animals with spikes, fur and beak have been described as “living fossils”.
Until now, the only proof of the existence of this species was a specimen of a dead animal that has been in a museum for decades.
Echidna graphic.
“I was elated, the whole team was elated.“Dr James Kempton told BBC News about the moment he saw Attenborough’s echidna in footage from one of the expedition’s cameras.
“I’m not kidding when I say it was on the last memory card we looked at, from the last camera we picked up, on the last day of our expedition,” he explained, still in disbelief.
The echidna It is, apart from the platypus, the only mammal that lays eggs.
Of the four echidna species, three have long beaks, and two of them, the Attenborough echidna and the western echidna, are considered critically endangered.
The proof
Kempton, a biologist from the University of Oxford, traveled for a month with a team made up of scientists from different countries to unexplored areas of the Cyclops Mountains, a steep jungle habitat located 2,000 meters above sea level in Indonesia.
As well as finding Attenborough’s “lost echidna”, the expedition discovered new species of insects and frogs, and observed healthy populations of tree kangaroos and birds of paradise.
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The Cyclops Mountains are steep and dangerous, in addition to being the habitat of species that we still “don’t know.” (EXPEDITION CYCLOPS).
But there is no doubt that the highlight of the expedition was observing the echidna in its habitat.
Previous expeditions to the Cyclopean Mountains had discovered signs of their existence, such as nose marks in the ground.
But they were unable to access the most remote areas of the mountains and provide definitive proof of their existence.
This has meant that during the last 62 years The only evidence that Attenborough’s echidna existed was a specimen preserved in the Treasure Room of Naturalisthe natural history museum of the Netherlands.
“It’s quite flat,” says Pepijn Kamminga, Naturalis collection director, as he shows it off.
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Pepijn Kamminga holds the specimen of the Attenborough echidna. (BBC/JONAH FISHER).
To the untrained eye, looks like a squashed hedgehogbecause when it was first collected by the Dutch botanist Pieter van Royen it was not stuffed.
The importance of the specimen was not clear until 1998, when x-rays revealed that it was not another species of echidna, but an adult specimen and different from Attenborough’s.
It was then that the species was named in honor of David Attenborough.
“When it was discovered, people thought that maybe it was already extinct because it was the only one,” Kamminga explains. “So this [el redescubrimiento] “It’s incredible news.”
“Sacred mountains”
The Cyclops Mountains are steep and dangerous to explore.
To reach the highest elevations, where echidnas are found, scientists had to climb narrow ridges of moss and tree roots – often in rainy conditions – with steep cliffs on either side.
During their climb through the mountains, they felt earthquakes on two occasions.
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Map of the location of the Cyclops Mountains.
Once the scientists reached the highest parts, it became clear that the mountains were full of species new to science.
“My colleagues and I couldn’t stop laughing,” explained Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou, a Greek insect specialist.
“We were very excited because we always said ‘this is new, no one has seen it’ or ‘oh my god, I can’t believe I’m seeing this’. “It was a truly monumental expedition,” said Davranoglou.
“We have to protect these sacred mountains,” added Gison Morib, a conservationist with YAPPENDA, an Indonesian non-profit organization that collaborated with the University of Oxford on the expedition.
“There are so many endemic species that we don’t know about,” he highlighted.
