Indigenous Tribes and Teddy Roosevelt Totally Called This "New" Tapir Species

A new species of tapir has been discovered in the Brazilian Amazon, the first new tapir species described in nearly 150 years.

The discovery caps an impressive year for zoologists on the continent. In July, researchers described the olinguito, the first mammalian carnivore discovered in the Americas in last 35 years. Last month, researchers split one species of small jungle cat living in Brazil into two distinct species after discovering that the two groups rarely interact and never interbreed.

Like the olinguito, the new tapir, Tapirus kabomani, has been known for years to indigenous tribes living in the area but has just been described by greater scientific community. The kabomani is believed to live in southwestern areas of the Amazon in Brazil, and the southeastern Colombian region of the Amazon. Like other recent finds, scientists had noted the tapir before, most notably in papers published in 1954 and 2010, but scientists believed that kabomani was simply a variation of other tapir species.

In fact, Teddy Roosevelt apparently once owned the first known specimen of kabomani, and he recognized that it was different than the type of tapir he had once killed on a hunting trip in South America. According to a document written by Roosevelt in 1914, his specimen “was a bull, full grown but very much smaller than the animal [he] had killed. The hunters said that this was a distinct kind.” At the time, scientists considered it to be a variation of Tapirus terrestris.

Brazilian researcher Mario Cozzuolof the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, lead author of the Journal of Mammology paper, says that further look at the kabomani’s DNA and morphology led him and his colleagues to classify it as a new species.

The Tapirus kabomani is the fifth known species of tapir and is the first new species of tapir to be described since 1865.

Though scientists who studied the tapir previously weren’t able to find enough evidence to classify the kabomani as a new species, indigenous people, who hunt the animal, apparently were. Fabricio Santos, a coauthor of the report, told Monga Bay that indigenous people “were essential” in helping the team find the tapir in the wild.

“They [knew] about this variety for decades, if not centuries, and the hunters can precisely differentiate both species,” he said. “All of the skulls they provided us matched our morphometric and DNA analyses.”

As you’d expect, discoveries of this nature are extremely rare. The kabomani tapir can weigh up to 240 pounds, which is large for an as-yet-undiscovered species, but is actually quite small for a tapir. Other species of tapir can grow to be more than 700 pounds. Like other tapirs, the kabomani is a herbivore.

Once again, camera traps played an important role in documenting the existence of kabomani. Scientists were able to get pictures of pairs of male and female tapirs and lone ones wandering through the forest. According to the paper, the “new species is not rare in the upper Madeira River region, in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon” but notes that habitat destruction and climate change could eventually threaten kabomani and a full survey of their population needs to take place.

“It is thus urgent to determine the conservation status, geographic range, and environmental requirements of this species, to understand how it is affected by human activities,” the paper said.