On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists have observed one of the planet’s smallest and rarest primates – 80 years after it was thought to have become extinct.
The pygmy tarsier is a mouse-sized big-eyed animal that weighs almost 60 grams. The last one spotted alive was in 1921 before the species went into hiding.
Their descendants certainly didn’t seem thrilled to be found.
‘I have the dubious honour of being the only person in the world to have been bitten by (a pygmy tarsier),’ Texas A&M university professor Sharon Gursky-Doyen told LiveScience.
‘My field assistant was holding the tarsier and I was attaching a radio collar around its neck and while I was attaching the radio collar he bit me (on the finger).’
The university team trapped two males and a female on Mount Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park and placed radio collars on the animals for tracking.
The pygmy tarsier, believed for eight decades to have been extinct, makes a rare appearance
Tarsiers are unusual primates – the mammalian group that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes and people. They are nocturnal and unusually have claws instead of finger nails. The handful of tarsier species live on various Asian islands.
The pygmy tarsiers were rediscovered when two Indonesian scientists trapping rats accidentally trapped and killed one in 2000.
‘Until that time, everyone really didn’t believe that they existed because people had been going out looking for them for decades and nobody had seen them or heard them,’ Gursky-Doyen said.
Researchers say they hope that the Indonesian government will protect them from the encroaching development occurring in the animals’ home range.
