The Giant Elephant Shrew and 26 Other New Vertebrates Found in Tanzania

Even as we drive an incredible number of species to extinction, new species are still being discovered—sometimes after they're already extinct. Lest we forget how little we still know about the natural world, an international team of researchers announced in a study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions that they have discovered 27 new species of vertebrates living in the mountains of Tanzania.

As anyone who has hiked as much as a large hill can tell you, even a small change in elevation can change an environment dramatically. As mountains formed, and created isolated microclimates, plants and animals adapted, sometimes to the point of becoming entirely different species. As a result, mountains have a lot of diversity and endemism. The Eastern Arc Mountains are no exception.

Forests have covered the "geologically ancient" Eastern Arc Mountains, which stretch from southern Kenya down to south-central Tanzania, for millions of years. Even though tropical forests are known to be hot-spots of species diversity, data on the Eastern Arc Mountains was lacking. The new surveys raised the number of endemic and regional endemic vertebrates by 24 percent.

"Twenty-three of the 27 new species that we reported in the study are amphibian and reptiles," said Michele Menegon, a researcher with the Tropical Biodiversity Section at MUSE who worked on the study. "These results make the Eastern Arc the most important site in Africa for these two classes of vertebrate. Some of these species are up to 100 million years old and are evidence of the great age, forest stability and unique evolutionary history of these mountains."

This forest chameleon, one of the three new reptiles found during the study, was discovered in the Mahenge mountains, and certainly has some prehistoric overtones. Along with the other discovered species, it will be part of a revived pitch by Tanzania to UNESCO for long-term protection of these fragmented rainforests to defend the species living there as natural World Heritage Sites.

This small toad lives in a small area of mountaintop forests, 2,000 meters up, and is "already at a high risk of extinction," Menegon said.

The only mammal found in the study was the giant elephant shrew, pictured above, which is about as charismatic of a species as you could hope for.