A new species of mammal, near from elephant, has been discovered in Tanzania. It already has its own long bob, practical long bob for sure : rhynochocyon udzungwensis. It’s considers as “a type of giant elephant shrew”. This “cat-sized animal” is already reported in the Journal of Zoology. It eats ant, it’s grey face, long and flexible snout and amber body. According to Dr Rathbun, those types of elephant shrews are only discovered in Africa. They were described as shrews because of their similarities with shrews in Europe and in America. But this discovery proved it’s closer than a group of african mammals, like elephants or sea cows. They seemed to have a common ancestor about 100 millions years ago.
This animal has already been caught on film in 2005 in mountains of Tanzania by Francesco Rovero, from the Trento Museum of Natural Sciences in Italy. Since the first documentary published in BBC, Dr Rathbun thought it was new to science :“Elephant shrews are almost all distinguished by distinctive colour patterns, and this is especially true of the forest-dwelling giant sengis (…) and this one, with it’s grey face and black rump, was pretty different.” It’s weighing 700 g and measuring about 30 cm in length. It feeds with its long nose wich is used to flick up insects. Today, scientists always not know how many they are in the world, their mores, their ranges, … “It’s vital this biodiversity hotspots were protected” Dr Rathbun said.
