On December 16, 2024 the World Wildlife Fund released a 74-page report on 234 new species discoveries in the Greater Mekong region.
The vast, water-rich swath of land spans six countries: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The diverse region is a hotspot for some of the world’s most endangered animals, including tigers, Asian elephants, long-horned saolas, Mekong dolphins, and many more.
And this new report — which is a culmination of hundreds of scientific studies — sheds light on even more vulnerable creatures, that were only just gifted their scientific name.
Among the 173 species of vascular plants, 26 reptiles, 17 amphibians, 15 fishes, and three mammals noted in the research, one five-inch animal stood out among the rest, namely because the “new species” had already been discovered — and sat in a dusty archive drawer for 83 years.
The story of the vampire hedgehog
The vampire hedgehog (or Hylomys macarong) is from the gymnure family, which are also known as “moonrats” or “soft-furred hedgehogs.”
Its species name “macarong” comes from the Vietnamese word for vampire, due to its long fangs.
The vampire hedgehog has bristly fur in lieu of spikes and looks like a cross between a shrew and a rat — despite being more closely related to hedgehogs than rodents.
The solitary creature keeps its local ecosystem in check by foraging at twilight for worms, mollusks, pests, and small reptiles.
Ironically — given its namesake — gymnures like the vampire hedgehog are known to emit a very strong scent, typically described as rancid garlic, which they produce when marking their territory.
Although the vampire hedgehog was recently discovered in the southern Annamites of Vietnam, a specimen of the same animal has been housed in a collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History since 1961.
Thanks to “an international effort to revise the taxonomy of lesser gymnures,” six countries took a look back at museum collections dating back to the 1930s.
That’s when researchers at the Smithsonian uncovered an animal thought lost to time.
“The specimens that led to the description of Hylomys macarong had been housed in the Smithsonian since the 1960s, highlighting the potential of ‘mining’ museums for new species,” Arlo Hinckley — a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian — explained in the report.
“The advent of museum genomics in Greater Mekong countries will speed up species discoveries, particularly in Thailand and Viet Nam that already have major natural history collections with large historical specimen series.”
“Similarly,” he continued, “we must keep collecting specimens in poorly sampled regions for the next generations – they will surely also discover new species that we overlooked.”
Perhaps even more astounding, the vampire hedgehog was discovered again in southern Vietnam during a 2009 expedition.
However the process of examining the collected specimens and catologing it as a new species was exhaustive, and it took more than a decade for the animal to join other species on the scientific record.
“We found this distinct species in Vietnam more than 10 years ago, but we took too long to describe it and were too late,” Alexei V. Abramov, a doctor at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in the report.
Despite the slow page turns of scientific progress, gymnure researchers celebrated as dots were connected across time — and as the creature finally received much-deserved recognition.
“Identifying a new mammal species that is just known from the southern Annamites and that is the result of millions of years of evolution is a bit like the inclusion of a Picasso in an art gallery or the discovery of an archaeological site in a city,” Hinckley said.
“It gives these places additional value, and hopefully funding to protect such an important heritage.”
Header image via Richard Mortel / Wikimedia Commons
