Mistaken identity: A lone specimen of the Attenborough echidna is housed in a Dutch museum.
Credit: Hein van Grouw/National Museum of Natural History Naturalis, Leiden
SYDNEY: A supposedly extinct species of Papuan echidna – one of the few monotremes known beyond Australia – may be alive, according to zoologists who believe they've uncovered its tracks and burrows.
Experts from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in Britain, stumbled across the telltale evidence of the Attenborough long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi) during a May expedition through Papua New Guinea's Cyclops Mountains.
The "shoe-box-sized", species was only officially described in 1998 from a single museum specimen and was already believed to be extinct at that point.
Primitive mammals
Though the museum specimen had been collected in 1961 by a Dutch botanist, it was misidentified at that time. Its significance was only realised when mammal expert Colin Groves of the Australian National University in Canberra and Tim Flannery (scientist and Australian of the Year) rediscovered the specimen nine years ago as part of an echidna study.
They named the specimen – currently housed at the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands – for famed naturalist and BBC TV presenter David Attenborough, in recognition of his contribution "to the public appreciation of New Guinean fauna and flora".
There are only five known modern species of monotreme, which are unusual egg-laying mammals; the duck-billed platypus and four species of superficially hedgehog-like echidna. Although monotremes are often touted as uniquely Australian fauna, three of the echidnas (including the Attenborough echidna) are endemic to the island of New Guinea, found north of Australia.
However, no one had seen the Attenborough echidna in the wild since 1961, so biologists assumed it was extinct, said the ZSL's Jonathon Baillie. In a last ditch attempt to confirm the status of the species, Baillie's team mounted a month-long expedition in May to the Cyclops Mountains under the auspices of the society's Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) program. The mission involved trekking through dense cloud forest that has remained completely unexplored for nearly 50 years.
During that month, Baillie's team found local tribes who reported seeing the echidna, an animal they refer to as "Payangko". This gave the researchers confidence that they were on the right track as "descriptions from the villagers were largely consistent with the descriptions of the museum specimen, and the species was the only echidna known from those mountains, Baillie told Cosmos Online.
"We interviewed hunters in the village ... and discovered that Attenborough's echidna had been captured and eaten as recently as 2005. We then went with the villagers to the sites where echidnas had been trapped or seen and found what we believe to be fresh feeding tracks. They leave very distinctive marks – known as nose-pokes – as they search for worms, said Baillie.
Tracks and nose-pokes
Though the team did not spot a live echidna on this occasion, they are confident that the distinctive tracks belong to the supposedly extinct species. "It's nocturnal and extremely difficult to find," said Baillie, who plans to return to Papua next year to capture and photograph the species.
"Oh boy!... I think it is very exciting," commented the ANU's Colin Groves on the possibility that the echidna he described is still clinging on.
"A species may be classified as extinct for a number of reasons, one of which is failure to find a specimen for 50 years. The Attenborough echidna nearly, not quite, fulfills that criterion, and the fact that very few biologists have visited the area since then, and that other new species have been found there, led to the assumption that it might be extinct," said Groves.
The discovery raises questions as to whether the World Conservation Union (IUCN) criterion for assessing extinction status is adequate. Prior to 1990 the IUCN operated under the 50-year rule. However, the rules have now been clarified, and today the IUCN labels a species as extinct only if "there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died". This means the onus has shifted to scientists to show that repeated efforts to survey a species failed to turn up any individual sightings or evidence of its continued survival.
The latest update of the IUCN Red List (a comprehensive inventory of the conservation status of species), released in 2006, revealed that each year a small number of 'extinct' species like the Attenborough echidna are rediscovered – becoming so-called 'Lazarus species' that have risen from the dead – or are reclassified as "data deficient".
In addition to rediscovering the echidna, the ZSL researchers "found an astonishingly vast array of biodiversity some of which is highly unlikely to be known to science," said Baillie. He added that they are yet to fully catalogue their haul.
