The Ark Files - Animal Discoveries

While more of the world's species become extinct
each day, other kinds of animals are still being found.
Some of the most amazing discoveries have been in the last one hundred years.

STOP PRESS

A dark, velvety coat; white striped legs; a pale, ghostly face
with a long snout and a blue tongue; long, donkey-like ears
and short horns. What was it? A zebra with a blue tongue? A
forest donkey? A short-necked giraffe?

In 1901 a news flash went around the world of the discovery of this extraordinary animal, deep in the jungles of Africa. Such an animal had never before been seen by white people but it was known to the Wambutti pygmies of the Congo as the o'api (pronounced okapi). It was quite a puzzle to work out exactly what it was since, at first, only parts of the animal were available - the leftovers from the pygmies' meals! Not until the whole animal was finally examined was the riddle solved and the okapi turned out to be a new species of forest-dwelling giraffe. The okapi is still known as the greatest zoological discovery of the 20th Century.

WORLD’S SMALLEST ANIMAL

A bat as small as a bumblebee and with a pig-like snout was discovered in Thailand in 1973. These exceptionally tiny bats are tailless and have enormous wings for their size. Their biggest claim to fame, however, is that they are the holder of the Guinness Book of Records title as the world’s smallest mammal. Weighing in at only two grams, they have been named the Kitti’s Hog-nosed Bat (or the bumblebee bat).

DARWIN'S PREDICTION

In 1862, when Charles Darwin was in Madagascar, he came across a very odd flower. The native orchid had a 30cmlong tube which produced nectar at its tip. This was much deeper than any other orchid and would need an insect with a tongue at least 28-30cm long to be able to reach the nectar and, in doing so, pollinate the flower.

Darwin predicted that a moth or a butterfly with an amazingly long tongue just had to exist. But it wasn't until 40 years later, in 1903, that the "had-to-be" moth was finally discovered - the Madagascan Long-tongued Hawk Moth - with the foretold 28cm-long insect tongue.

BORNEAN WATER MONSTER

Way back in the 18th Century, villagers living in the remote lakes area of eastern Borneo told stories of strange water monsters. They called these creatures pesuts. In 1985, a French biologist, intrigued by the stories, was led a merry chase in a canoe by these so-called non-existent creatures, until finally they were caught, unharmed, in a net spread across the river.

No longer a myth, they are thought to be a new type of river dolphin. The pesuts have a streamlined body and a blunt head but differ from other dolphins by not having any teeth and also in the way they hunt. The pesut first stuns its prey by shooting a powerful jet of water at it and then sucks it, vacuum cleaner-like, into its toothless jaws. So strong is the suction that they almost captured the arm of the biologist!

OLD FOUR LEGS

A very strange fish turned up one day in 1938 in a pile of fish trawled from off the tip of South Africa. This animal was previously only known from fossils which dated back to the time of the dinosaurs and was thought to have been extinct for at least 60 million years. It was a very large fish with heavy, armour-like scales. It had more fins than usual, some like stumpy legs, and a strange, three-lobed tail fin. This was a coelacanth – and what made this fish so special was that it was thought to be closely related to the first four legged land animals.

It wasn't until 14 years later that another coelacanth was found in a Comoro Island fish market where the natives used its scales for sandpaper! When the first live coelacanth was captured in 1972, the fisherman received a 10,000-pound reward, equal to a fisherman's wages for a hundred years. The coelacanth wasn't seen in its natural habitat till 1987 when it was filmed, using a two-man submersible, in deep waters off the Comoros. Discovered living in lava rock crevices, the fish has a curious habit of drifting upside down and then standing on its head for up to two minutes. It could also swim backwards but it did not use its limb-like fins to walk on the bottom of the sea bed.