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For the first time in over 60 years, a rare egg-laying mammal has been spotted by scientists. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi) was caught on camera during a major expedition in the Cyclops Mountains in Indonesia’s Papua Province.
A sacred animal
The long-beaked echidna is named for wildlife documentarian and conservationist Sir David Attenborough and has only been recorded by scientists once, in 1961. It is considered a monotreme, or an evolutionary distinct group of mammals who can lay eggs. The platypus is also a monotreme and there are only five remaining species of these strange types of mammal on Earth.
They live in burrows and mainly eat insects, earthworms, and termites. They are listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and are only known to live in the Cyclops Mountains.
“Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna has the spines of a hedgehog, the snout of an anteater, and the feet of a mole. Because of its hybrid appearance, it shares its name with a creature of Greek mythology that is half human, half serpent,” University of Oxford biologist James Kempton said in a statement. “The reason it appears so unlike other mammals is because it is a member of the monotremes–an egg-laying group that separated from the rest of the mammal tree-of-life about 200 million years ago.”
The echidna also has cultural significance for the people in the village of Yongsu Sapari. They have lived on the northern slopes of the Cyclops Mountains for eighteen generations. Rather than fighting during conflicts, the tradition is for one party to go up into the Cyclops to find echidna while the other party goes to the ocean to search for a marlin. Both of these creatures were difficult to find, and it would take decades to even whole generations to locate them. However, once they were found, the marlin and echidna would symbolize the end of the conflict.
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Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, photographed by a camera trap. Expedition Cyclops
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