Radical Joy Revealed
December 3, 2014
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Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places. We hope you'll enjoy these doorways into places that are both familiar and surprising, and we welcome your suggestions, stories, and photos. Click here to subscribe.


Meet the Olinguito:
A New Animal Species Discovered


adorable olinguito
The olinguito, "a cross between a cat and a teddy bear"

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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See How the World Made Beauty
for the Earth

On June 20 people around the world will go to wounded places to share their stories of what the places mean to them, spend time getting to know the places as they are now, and make a simple act of beauty there: a bird created out of materials found on site. Join the world in making beauty for the Earth for the 6th annual Global Earth Exchange.

To see the photos of the 2014 Global Earth Exchange, visit our website. To read the stories click on the little "pins" on our world map.
Radical Joy for Hard Times is a global community dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Reconnecting with these places, sharing our stories of loss and despair, and making acts of beauty there, we transform the land, reconnect people and the places that nourish them, and empower ourselves to make a difference in the way we live on Earth.
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