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Elephant Shrew Species Rediscovered in Djibouti After 50 Years
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August 19, 2020
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0:57Now PlayingA mouse-sized elephant shrew has been rediscovered in Djibouti in Africa after being missing for 50 years.
Also known as the Somali sengi, this tiny mammal has been lost to science since 1968 and is one of Global Wildlife Conservation’s 25 most wanted lost species. It has been among the least well-known of the world’s 20 species of sengis, making it one of the last big mysteries of African mammalogy. It is known to science only from 39 individuals collected up to hundreds of years ago and stored today at museums.
The discovery was published on August 18 in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PeerJ.
“Sengi biology is a science of passion,” said Steven Heritage, a research scientist at the Duke University Lemur Center and lead author on the paper. “It takes somebody that’s motivated by passion for sengis to go out looking for this lost species. They are not well-known animals, but when you see them, it’s impossible not to adore them.”
The Somali sengi mates for life and uses its long, trunk-like nose to feast on insects. It is
In 2019, a team of scientists including Heritage; legendary sengi researcher, the late Galen Rathbun from the California Academy of Sciences; and Houssein Rayaleh from Association Djibouti Nature, set out in search of the eccentric insectivorous mammal.
In total the team saw 12 sengis during their expedition and obtained the first-ever photos and video of live Somali sengis for scientific documentation. They did not witness any looming threats to the species’ habitat, which is dry and largely inhospitable to human activities such as development or agriculture. Because the abundance of the species seems about the same as other sengi taxa and because they were able to determine that its range extends beyond just Somalia into Djibouti (and possibly even Ethiopia), they were able to make a recommendation to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species that the Somali sengi’s current data deficient status get updated to least concern.
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