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Introduction
When species go undocumented for sustained periods of time this raises extinction concerns. In 2022, Long and Rodriguez proposed a nomenclature to describe long unrecorded animal, plant, and fungi species that are not yet classified extinct: those for which no genetic, photographic, or audio evidence has been recorded in over a decade are called ‘lost species’1. Currently there are more than 2,000 so-called lost species1. Some may well be extinct – casualties of a global biodiversity crisis2 – but rediscoveries offer hope that others survive3, especially in places where biological research has been limited4.
On the world’s largest tropical island, New Guinea, numerous species rediscoveries have recently been made5, including in the remote North Coastal Ranges (NCR) – isolated mountain areas with profound endemism situated across northern New Guinea6. Among the NCR, the Cyclops Mountains (Fig. 1) is the only known location in which another lost species, Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi (Flannery & Groves, 1998), has been recorded in modern times, when the holotype specimen was collected in 19617.
Fig. 1 [Images not available. See PDF.]
The Cyclops Mountains region.
The Cyclops Mountains are a small range at the Indonesia-Papua New Guinea border. The mountains, which reach a maximum altitude of 1970 m, contain the 31,500 ha Pegunungan Cycloops protected area (black dashed line), and are surrounded by urban settlements to the south and west, and small villages of Indigenous communities, such as Yongsu Sapari and Yongsu Dosoyo, to the north. The Cyclops are the last known location of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, but there is also subfossil evidence from Lachitu Cave in the Oenake Mountains, Papua New Guinea, that it once existed there (see Supplementary Fig. 1).
Taxonomists currently recognise three modern long-beaked echidnas, classified in the genus Zaglossus: the Western long-beaked echidna (Z. bruijnii); the Eastern long-beaked echidna (Z. bartoni); and Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Z. attenboroughi). Together they represent three of the five modern egg-laying mammal species — sole living representatives of the monotreme lineage that diverged from therians (marsupials and placental mammals) approximately 200 million years ago (mya)8, 9–10. Z. attenboroughi, named after naturalist Sir David Attenborough,...