Initially mistaken for one of its close relatives, a group of small, spiky mammals in eastern China has now been identified as a new species: the eastern forest hedgehog.
Comparing the physical appearance and DNA of these hedgehogs with the four known species in the Mesechinus genus confirmed the newly found hedgehogs are unique, the team reports November 28 in ZooKeys. Officially named Mesechinus orientalis, the eastern forest hedgehog brings the total number of known hedgehog species to 19.
Kevin Campbell, a biologist at the University of Manitoba in Canada not involved in the work, was not surprised by the debut of a new hedgehog species in China. “It’s a very large landscape, it’s a very varied landscape,” he says. “In the last 10 years or so, there’s been a huge increase in the number of species recognized from that area.”
About as long as a pencil and weighing roughly as much as a can of soda, M. orientalis rivals M. hughi for puniest Mesechinus hedgehog. But M. orientalis is distinguishable from M. hughi by the shapes of a couple of its teeth and its skull near the temple. Eastern forest hedgehogs also boast the shortest spines of any species in the genus. Their black-tipped spines are a mere 1.8 to 2 centimeters long, about a half-centimeter shorter than M. hughi’s spines.
2023-12-13 08:30:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org