The detective story of a little flying squirrel

Do you think that all species have already been discovered on Earth? And that the time of researchers who stumble upon something new is irretrievably gone? Well, you are wrong! And we are not talking about bacteria, insects, or even more so viruses (they are indeed discovered regularly and in large quantities), but about mammals.

True, we are talking more about the systematics of already known species. And here new, very interesting prospects open up before scientists thanks to genetics. The relatively recent opportunity to study and compare genes makes it possible to establish family ties between animals. Species similar to each other as two drops of water can be the seventh water on the jelly. And vice versa: plants or animals that are completely different from each other turn out to be the closest relatives or even the same species.

So, at the end of July of this year, the results of the work of Russian and Vietnamese zoologists regarding the genus of flying squirrels were published in the Divercity magazine. This genus has long been deleted from the taxonomy. The work was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation.

Let’s start, as they say, ab ovo. Flying squirrels are a tribe in the subfamily of true squirrels that have developed a unique property: the ability to plan. Between the front and hind limbs they have a leather membrane. The flying squirrel jumps from the tree, spreads all four paws to the sides and flies. She can even control the flight by changing the tension of the membrane with the help of her front paws. The tail serves as a stabilizer. The range can be different: small flying squirrels in a low forest jump 15-30 meters, and giant flying squirrels in a tall tropical forest can fly up to 300 meters.

Flying squirrels appeared in the Miocene in Southeast Asia, so they are most diverse there.

– Tropical Asia is known for its extremely diverse fauna, the richness of which is greatly underestimated, – says Anna Bannikova, head of the project, Doctor of Biology, leading researcher at the Department of Vertebrate Zoology of the Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University, – That is why the discoveries of species new to both the region and the region are so frequent. and for science.

In these forests, zoologists have caught a small flying squirrel. By external signs, it belonged to the genus Petinomys, the species P. setosus or Temminka’s flying squirrel. These are dwarf squirrels, which English zoologists even called dwarf flying squirrels – flying dwarf squirrels. This was a strange find, since gnome flying squirrels live in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and they are rare in mainland Southeast Asia. In the forests of Vietnam, they do not occur at all. What wind carried it there?

The experts decided to test their prey for genetic analysis – and were very surprised.

“Outwardly, it was a representative of the genus Petinomys, that is, dwarf squirrels, but genetically it turned out to be far from not only Temminck’s flying squirrels, but also from this genus as a whole,” says Anna Bannikova.

It was no longer genetic or zoological, but rather archival research that helped solve the riddle.

It turns out that back in the first half of the 20th century, American researcher Thomas Donald Carter discovered a flying squirrel unknown to science. He compiled a description of it and named it Olisthomys morrisi.

Further, this description fell into the hands of paleontologist Malcolm Carnegie McKenna. In addition to paleontology and the mysteries of mass extinctions, McKenna was a taxonomist of mammals and was an outstanding specialist in this field. He published an article in which he explained in detail how the representatives of the genus Olisthomys differ from the genus Petinomys. However, for a long time in the taxonomy of flying squirrels, the names Olisthomys and Petinomys were considered synonymous. The question was not even discussed among zoologists.

“Our find has many features that are characteristic of O. morrisi and do not correspond to P. Setosus,” comments Vladimir Lebedev, a researcher at the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University. “The phylogenetic trees constructed on the basis of the results of sequencing — schemes of evolutionary relationship — testify in favor of the generic independence of Olisthomys.

The Russian-language Wikipedia article lists 14 genera of flying squirrels, and the genus Olisthomys is not on the list. There is also no article describing the genus Petinomys – this name is marked in red. In the English Wikipedia, the genus Olisthomys is not listed either as a synonym for the genus of gnome squirrels, or as an independent genus. Moreover, this genus is not found through search engines either.

Recently, thanks to the development of genetics, Wikipedia articles on various animals and plants are constantly being changed, edited and supplemented. You come in six months to an article devoted, for example, to cats – and you don’t recognize it. Let’s hope that the articles on flying squirrels – and specifically the two mentioned genera – will also be promptly edited, and the missing articles will be written.

Because in addition to Divercity magazine, people should have more popular sources of information about the beautiful, amazing and diverse animal world.

Yana MAYEVSKAYA.

Photo faunistics.com