Hidden in the drawers for a century: two new bandicoot species were sitting in museums all along

The new species were not in the jungle. They were in drawers. A ten-year investigation by Australian researchers — measuring skulls and sampling DNA from hundreds of bandicoot specimens in museums around the world — has recognised two additional species among the short-nosed bandicoots, plus several new subspecies. One, the little brown bandicoot of South Australia, is bittersweet: scientists believe it vanished about a century ago, before anyone knew it existed, its specimens sitting unnoticed for generations. The other, the New Guinea brown bandicoot, was promoted from subspecies to a species in its own right. And there is straightforward good news for a living favourite: the quenda, long thought to be a Western Australian animal, once ranged east to Adelaide, Kangaroo Island and the Nuyts Archipelago — a wider world than anyone knew. The revision, published in the Australian Journal of Taxonomy, redraws the map that conservation works from.

SDG 15 · Life on land