But the nameless little beast scampering through the Kalimantan leafmould is unselfconscious about its rarity and feels neither the loneliness nor the isolation which the human world has projected onto it. It just wanted to vanish back into the obscurity from which it was plucked by a World Wide Fund for Nature paparazzo. Relentlessly, one by one, under the banner of protecting the world's wide places, scientists and conservationists are stripping the mystery from these very places by exposing the last unknown mammals.

The existence of what may, or may not, be the latest in a string of new mammals to have been discovered in the last decade was announced in Jakarta on Monday. As with many of the previous discoveries, the evidence is, at least at first, indirect - not the animal itself, captured or seen by a scientist, but two blurry photographs showing, first, a skinny scurrier like a wingless bat with a long fat tail, its muzzle obscured by a leaf, and second, the same creature from behind, with haunches like a monkey and a tail like a well-fed ginger tom.

If past discoveries, such as the Vietnamese otter-civet or the Borneo ferret-badger are a guide, the newbie may come to be known as the cat-dog-fox-monkey-lemur. Then again, the head of the team which discovered it goes by the name of Stephen Wulffraat, so it could, in theory, end up being named after him.

Dr Wulffraat's mobile in Indonesia wasn't working yesterday and his fellow mammal-hunters were, in the main, all deep in far wooded places where telecommunications are only a rumour.

Ginette Hemley of the World Wide Fund for Nature, which along with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has been the main organisation backing the scientists who have discovered new mammals, was cautious about the new creature's identity. "This is potentially a new species," she said. "It has not been confirmed. Doing that will require physical evidence we do not yet have."

The WWF's next stage is to catch one. "We plan to set some live traps to catch a specimen, or two if we can, and use appropriate experts who know about small animals like this and essentially do measurements and analysis and take some samples."

If there appears to be a degree of urgency in the WWF's mammal-hunting team, it's because time is not on their side. Earlier this year the Indonesian authorities, with the backing of a Chinese bank, announced a multi-billion-pound plan to plant oil palms in the high mountain forests where the mystery beast lives.

The WWF is sceptical about the project - oil palms do not grow well at high altitude, and there are other areas of Borneo which would appear to be more suitable. The organisation suspects a grab attempt for the old-growth timber on the high ridges.

"We're not opposed to an oil palm plantation being developed, as long as it's done in a way that is not going to harm biodiversity," says Hemley.

Incredibly, the Borneo cat-dog-fox-monkey-lemur may be the third previously unknown mammal discovered this year. In a hunter's market in central Laos, a WCS researcher, Robert Timmins, came across a short-legged rodent with a hairy tail and a long snout, as if it started out as a rat, toyed with guinea pigness, and ended up as a squirrel. In this case, "previously unknown" is strictly a culturally relative term. The animal was on sale along with some vegetables, and was well enough known by local Laotians to have a name: the kha-nyou. Several years previously Timmins discovered a new species of striped rabbit in the same region.

"Sceptics might say that if we are still discovering such amazing new animals then why are people worried about wildlife loss; but, of course, it is an indication of how little we know, and a window on to what we could be losing without ever knowing," he said at the time of the kha-nyou encounter.

The notable mammal discoveries of the last decade have been made not by Indiana Jones-style mammal-hunters but by scientists who were not necessarily looking for what they found. Timmins, for instance, was working on an anti-poaching programme in Laos when he came across the kha-nyou.

The discovery of 2005's third new mammal, the kibunji or Highland Mangabey, a black-faced monkey with a punky quiff which lives in Tanzania, was made independently by two groups of scientists who only became aware of each other's work when they met in a bar in Dar es Salaam and began drinking together.

Tim Davenport, a British scientist working with WCS, said yesterday that since his photographs of the monkey were published in Science, he and his collaborators had obtained a specimen of the animal - a monkey killed by a Tanzanian farmer during a crop raid - and was subjecting it to DNA analysis to disprove early questions over whether it really was a new species.

"There's this assumption that Africa is fairly well known, but it's surprising how little is," he said last night. "And the places where the interesting things are yet to be found tend to be these remote mountain ranges."

Davenport acknowledged that "discovered for science" would be a more accurate phrase than "discovered", since a monkey which raided village vegetable gardens and had a local name had clearly been known to locals for thousands of years.

He and his team first heard about the kibunji during a routine survey of village life and hunting in the areas on the fringe of the wild country they were surveying - a standard technique to enrich scientific knowledge of an area.

"We started hearing about this animal," said Davenport. "This area has a lot of spirit animals and we were trying to work out which is a real animal and which is a spirit animal, which is very difficult. At first we thought the kibunji was a spirit animal and it turned out to be real. Now I take the possibility of other spirit animals turning out be to be real more seriously."

One such possibility, yet to be discovered or proved fictitious, is the Rongwe tiger. "It's some sort of striped animal, and we haven't come across anything more than the description. Whether it's a striped hyena or aardwolf way out of its range, or whether it's a spirit animal, or a new species, we can't be sure. But finding these things is often the thing that gets us out of the tent in the morning".

December 7, 2005
Possible Identification Proposed: The Rediscovery of an Extinct Species

The new animal from Borneo does somewhat match another camera trap "mystery creature" photographed by Malaysian wildlife specialists, and pictured directly below. This gave me a hint of what the “new” animal might be. Take a peek…

Photo credit goes to the Wildlife Conservation Society, Upper Baram Project, Malaysia. This organization obtained an interesting series of camera trap photos in 2004 on the unlogged areas of Mount Murud Kecil, Sarawak. One is of this slender unknown civet, shown above, with a very long tail, pale underparts and white around the muzzle, similar to Hose’s palm civet. This individual was photographed on the ridge of the mountain, far from the streams which are the Hose’s palm civet’s supposed habitat.

Compare the photos from Mount Murud Kecil, at the top of this blog, with this drawing of the newly discovered Borneo "civet." I think there is a good case to be made that the new Borneo animal is the allegedly extinct (since 1955) Hose’s palm civet, and may be similar to the above photographed "underreported" unknown civet from Mount Murud Kecil.

The new mammal "discovered" in Borneo, naturally, comes to the attention of cryptozoology and an analysis based on a broad review of what is ethnoknown about similar cryptids is helpful in revealing the “new” Borneo animal’s identity.

Please recall, this new Borneo animal is known only from two camera trap photographs (see our earlier blog), one of which shows this new animal with a leaf across its face and the other from behind. As far as is known, that is what has been deemed as evidence of this new animal’s "discovery."

But it does seem more proper to say this is the probable “rediscovery” of an extinct form, the Hose’s palm civet, as can be seen in a drawing from the excellent Lioncrusher reference site and shown directly below this paragraph. The Hose’s palm civet appears to be what we are talking about from Borneo, and in all of these situations.

Also, the "new" Borneo animal and the unknown Mount Murud Kecil civet reinforce, positively, the use of camera traps, as a method to show "hidden" animals, the foundation subjects of cryptozoology, literally the study of hidden animals.

With regard to this specific "new" Borneo animal, as noted above, it does therefore match this other camera trap "mystery creature" photographed by Malaysian wildlife specialists, which has never been widely shown before. The "new" Borneo animal is therefore a civet, members of the family Viverridae, and, I speculate, an example of a rediscovered (no longer extinct) Hose’s Palm Civet (Diplogale hosei).

BTW, the viverrids such as these Borneo civets, and the American procyonids (coatmundis and kinkajous) look like each other because of convergent evolution.

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