Zanzibar Servaline Genet - Discovery and Description

Discovery and Description

Although the servaline was known to rural Zanzibaris, zoologists remained unaware of its existence until the last decade of the 20th century. In 1995 Tony Archer, a wildlife consultant working in Zanzibar, acquired a dried skin and skull in the village of Kitogani, in south-central Unguja. This specimen was subsequently described as a new subspecies of servaline genet (G. s. archeri), named in honour of Archer.

In January 2003 live Zanzibar servaline genets were photographed for the first time in nearby Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park. Camera traps yielded pictures of servalines at four locations, two in groundwater forest in the heart of the park and two in dry scrub to the north-east. These photographs provided new information about the distribution of the genet and its physical characteristics.

Read more about this topic:  Zanzibar Servaline Genet

Famous quotes containing the words discovery and, discovery and/or description:

    The new supplants the old. Yet men’s minds are stuffed with outworn bunk. Educating the young in the latest findings of authorities and scholars in the social sciences is important. It is equally important to devise ways and means for aiding the middle-aged and old to reexamine hang-over unscientific doctrines and ideas in the light of recent discovery and research.
    Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)

    We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)