Olinguito Discovery: First New Animal the Western Hemisphere Has Seen in 35 Years

A team of scientists from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History have made the first new discovery of an animal in the western hemisphere in 35 years, BBC News reported.

The discovery came after zoologist Kristofer Helgen found bones and animal skins buried in a Chicago museum's storage. He did not recognize the skulls and immediately thought it could be a new species.

"It stopped me in my tracks," he told BBC News. "The skins were a rich red color and when I looked at the skulls I didn't recognize the anatomy. It was different to any similar animal I'd seen, and right away I thought it could be a species new to science."

Helgen, a curator at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. could not contain his excitement over the discovery of the olinguito, a member of the raccoon family.

The Smithsonian has the largest collection of mammals in the world, with more than 600,000 specimens flat-packed to save space. The olinguito may have been overlooked due to this and because many specimens are from centuries ago and are mislabeled.

Technological advances have allowed scientists to test DNA of even the oldest animals. Helgen was able to confirm his discovery by comparing the olinguito's DNA to the five other known raccoon relatives.

"The olinguito is a carnivore - that group of mammals that includes cats, dogs and bears and their relatives," Helgen said. "Many of us believed that list was complete, but this is a new carnivore - the first to be found on the American continent for more than three decades."

The olinguito was native to Central Colombia and Western Ecuador. Although it was a carnivore, it was known to eat fruit and, like raccoons, it came out at night. The scientists believe the animal was exhibited at several zoos in the 60s and 70s, but was misidentified as an olinga.

"The vast majority of the discoveries of new species are made in museum collections," says Chris Norris, of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in Connecticut and president of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. "Often people working 70 years ago or more had different ideas of what constituted a new species - maybe they didn't recognize things that we would as being distinct, or they might not have had access to technologies, such as being able to extract and sequence DNA."