mammal, which looks like a cross between a domestic house cat and a bear, is the smallest member of the raccoon family. Olinguitos are solitary, nocturnal and strictly arboreal, prowling high-elevation cloud forests along the western side of the Andes mountains in Colombia and Ecuador. Although they are members of Carnivora, they eat fruits, nectar and insects.

This animal was not identified as a new species in the field. Instead, this new species was right under our noses for almost 90 years: it was originally collected in Ecuador in 1923. The original specimens were prepared, labeled, catalogued and placed into museum collections, where they remained, undescribed and undiscovered, awaiting the expert eye of a knowledgable specialist.

The specimens waited for 80 years.

“New species are very often found in the drawersdifferences in teeth and skulls and it occurred to me ... could this be a new kind of mammal that all other zoologists had missed?”

During the next ten years, Dr Helgen travelled to almost every natural history museum in the world that holds these specimens to study them more closely. He assembled a team of raccoon experts that accompanied him on an expedition to Ecuador to find the animal. Referring to the data documenting where and when the museum specimens were collected by the original expedition, Dr Helgen’s team identified a place in central Ecuador where these animals probably still live.

One of the team members, biologist Miguel Pinto, a researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, went on a scouting trip to this location and found that