A team of researchers from Louisiana State University, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, the Victoria Museums and the University of Melbourne discovered a new species of musk shrew that lives on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
The new species baptized as the Sulawesi hairy-tailed shrew ( Crocidura caudipilosa ), is slim with gray-brown fur on its back and silver-gray fur on its belly.
Its tail is slightly longer than the combined length of its head and body and is covered in long bristles and hair, making the distinctive tail very shaggy. It is the only species of shrew in Indonesia, Malaysia or the Philippines that has such thick and long hair on its tail.
“There was no doubt that it was a new species. There is no other species on the island that has that much hair on its tail, in terms of shrews, "said Jake Esselstyn, a researcher at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Sciences and Biological Sciences and the lead leader of the study.
The Sulawesi hairy-tailed shrew was found in nine mountains across Sulawesi at various elevations from 450 to nearly 1,500 meters in elevation.
Reference: Jacob A Esselstyn, Anang S Achmadi, Heru Handika, Thomas C Giarla, Kevin C Rowe. A new climbing shrew from Sulawesi highlights the tangled taxonomy of an endemic radiation. Journal of Mammalogy, 2019; 100 (6): 1713 DOI: 10.1093 / jmammal / gyz077
