Saintperle

12/7/05






World Wildlife Fund photos of the beast sighted in the Borneo jungle (Stephen Wulffraat/EPA)


Is it a cat, a dog, a fox — or first sighting of a new carnivore?

From Nick Meo in Jakarta and Nigel Hawkes

DEEP in the jungle, something stirs. But is it a cat, a dog, a marten, a rare fox, or even — as some surmise — the first new carnivore to be found in South East Asia for more than 70 years?
The only evidence that exists are photographs taken by an automatically triggered camera on a jungle trail in Indonesia in 2003. Infuriatingly, a large leaf obscured the creature’s face as the shutter went off.

Undaunted, researchers from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) announced the discovery yesterday, claiming it as the first new carnivore to be found in the region since the Tonkin otter-civet emerged in Vietnam in 1930...

“We showed the photos to locals who know the wildlife of the area, but nobody had ever seen this creature before. We also consulted several Bornean wildlife experts. Some thought it looked like a lemur, but most were convinced it was a new species of carnivore.”


Entire story here
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