Weird-Looking Marsupial Found Alive After 6,000 Years of Alleged 'Extinction'

Field researchers call them “Lazarus taxa,” species once presumed extinct that suddenly appear to have risen from the dead. And scientists have found one more—a marsupial thought to have disappeared over 6,000 years ago. Researchers with the Australian Museum and the University of Papua discovered this elusive marsupial—known as the pygmy long-fingered possum (Dactylonax kambuayai)—still doing its thing within the remote rainforests of Indonesia’s Vogelkop Peninsula on the island of New Guinea. But the pint-sized, tree-dwelling mammal had company: a previously unknown genus of marsupial gliders. “Describing a new species is exciting enough. But identifying an entirely new genus is something else altogether,” the researchers wrote of their find in The Conversation. Elders from the island’s Tambrauw and Maybrat clans, who have long known about these creatures, helped the team identify and name the new genus Tous, the local nickname for these forest gliders. Each of the high-flying gliders, including the newly minted ring-tailed glider species (Tous ayamaruensis), are evolutionary offshoots from a branch of the possum family tree that, like the pygmy long-fingered possum, was previous