I have some interesting cryptid news today, a new carnivorous species was discovered on the American continent for the first time in 35 years. This is big news for science, and should be big news for the cryptozoological community as well. It’s not every day that you discover a new species, and it should be celebrated, because it tells us that as much as we know, there is always more out there to discover.
The animal is pictured above. This fuzzy little guy is known as the Olinguito (pronounced oh-lin-GHEE-toe), and he’s been terrorizing the treetops of the Central and South America for a long time now. The species is especially active in the Andean cloud forests (not from Star Wars, I checked) where they number well into the thousands.
The Olinguito escaped discovery for so long for a few reasons: they’re hard to spot through the dense fog that gives the cloud forest its name, they’re primarily nocturnal, and they look very similar to other mammals. This means no one really saw them, and the few that did see them just assumed they were a similar species known as the Olingos.
To be fair, new species ARE discovered nearly every day, but only in the insect and amphibian world. It’s extremely rare to find a new mammal, and especially a carnivorous mammal that has to hunt. The last carnivorous mammal discovered in the Western world was all the way back in 1978, when they found the Columbian Weasel.
If you want to read more about the Olinguito, you can find the full paper here from the Smithsonian Magazine, because now I want to talk about…
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CRYPTIDS?
This discovery validates the field of cryptozoology in the Americas. People always claim that a species like Bigfoot or a Dover Demon couldn’t exist because we would have found one by now, but this proves that there are mammals that manage to avoid detection. Now, I still think Bigfoot is a long shot, but with the discovery of the Olinguito, I can’t help but think…