Tapir ‘find’ puts science in tangle

IT was thought, until recently, that virtually all of the world’s large animals had been discovered.

Then DNA profiling knocked that idea on the head. In 2009, for example, geneticists suggested there were three species of African dwarf crocodile, not just one. In 2011, it was shown that the iconic Nile crocodile isn’t a single species either. It’s two. Last year, it was the turn of the slender-snouted crocodile; University of Florida scientists identified two types of them. Not every zoologist agrees, but there seem to be seven species of crocodile in Africa, rather than the traditional three.

2013 was a good year for such discoveries. A little fruit-eating relative of the racoon, the ‘olinguito’, was found in the cloud forests of the Andes. What was thought to be a single species of Brazilian wildcat turned out to be two, while three new types of lizard were identified in Peru. The year’s most unusual find was also South American. Scientists, examining tapir skulls, noticed that some of them were very small and had unusual features. This led to a DNA examination of museum and wild specimens, revealing the existence of a ‘pigmy’ or ‘dwarf’ tapir. Not since 1992 when the ‘saola’, a relative of cattle, was discovered in Vietnam, had such as large land mammal become known to Science.