Meet the Olinguito:
A New Animal Species Discovered
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The olinguito, "a cross between a cat and a teddy bear"
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You know, of course, that dozens of animal, insect, bird, and plant species around the world are going extinct every day. You know that, even though a certain amount of species loss is normal, the current rate of extinction is thousands of times over the average since the time of the dinosaurs.
And yet, every now and then, something amazing happens and an entirely new species turns out to have been prevailing on Planet Earth for millennia, and no one even knew about it.
Recently, a quite fetching little animal called the olinguito was discovered in the cloud forests of South America. Described as looking like a cross between a cat and a teddy bear, the olinguito was formerly confused with a cousin animal, the olingo. Which is why, when zoologists attempted to mate the two of them, they remained obstinately uninterested.
Said Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, "The discovery of the olinguito shows us that the world is not yet completely explored, its most basic secrets not yet revealed."
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