New Mammal Species 2016

Reticulated giraffes

2016 has, on the whole, been a bit of a rubbish year. Or so the common wisdom has it; one suspects that, for instance, the deaths of some particularly prominent celebrities at the beginning of the year has heightened our perception of those that died later on (relative to any other given year). And it's probably been quite a good year for you if happen to be a Trump supporter, or a fan of Nigel Farage.

But that debate doesn't belong here, instead, as the year draws to a close, it's time to take a survey of the species of mammal that have been newly discovered this year. Or, more accurately, newly named, since what we generally do these days is find some population of a previously known species that turns out not to belong to it, and to be something else instead. There have, as always, been a fair number of them this year, and there's no guarantee that they'll all stand the test of time, and still be considered valid species in, say, 2026.

My survey is, therefore, inevitably biased, with a just a semi-random sample of some of the species announcements I happen to have come across. Most of them are going to be small animals, since they're easier to overlook in the first place, but there are a couple of quite large ones. And, by "large", I don't mean just "wolf-sized", either.

The Secret Life of the Monito del Monte

There are something like a hundred species of marsupial in South America; hardly an insignificant amount. As I've mentioned before, the marsupials were, in fact, in South America before they ever reached Australia. While some headed south over the still green and verdant lands of Antarctica to reach the Australian continent beyond, others stayed behind, becoming the ancestors of the opossums and shrew-opossums that still live in the Americas today - including, of course, one species in the southern US.

But there is an oddity that confuses this simple picture, and that is a curious animal called the monito del monte (Dromiciops gliroides). In evolutionary terms, this gives every indication of being an Australian marsupial, being more closely related to animals like kangaroos than it is to American opossums. Which is a bit odd for an animal that lives in Chile and Argentina. How can this be so? The best guess is that the ancestors of Australian marsupials originated in South America before they crossed over to their new home, and that, for some reason, the monito del monte was the only one to survive in their original homeland. It is, however, also possible that the Australian marsupials really did originate in Australia - or, for that matter, in Antarctica - and that the monito del monte headed back to South America at a later date before the Straits of Magellan opened up.