The strange story of the elusive Flightless Scaly-Tailed Squirrel

The only picture of a „living“ animal ...

… and dead after being trapped!

YES, MAN HAS CON- QUE- RED EARTH, there are no white spots left, maybe some undiscovered caves exist and the bottom of the Seven Seas isn’t’ explored totally either. But a mammal which no living person has ever even seen alive? An animal which was never caught alive, not even by a camera? In more than 800 years of explorers, adventurers and scientists? YES, that’s the case. The Flightless Scaly-Tailed Squirrel, a tree-dweller in the rain forests of Central Africa, was only seen dead since the discovery in 1898. This pretty animal is so elusive that not a single photo exists, besides the ones of the cadavers. Scientific collections all around the world got 14 specimens only. Well, it’s no small animal, it measures app. 9 inches in length, plus a very special tail of ca. 6 inches. Because underneath it’s scaly and each scale is armed with a thorn, and therefore the tail works as fifth paw when the squirrel climbs or descends. It’s also a „Living fossil“, roaming the earth for millions of years, what only six of the 40 species of mammals achieved. The engraving, I show here, was done around 1900, after the artist studied some cadavers, and the photo of the dead squirrel was taken in 2015, after it died in a trap on the Atlantic island of Fernando Poo. An unsolved miracle: Why survive trapped animals not even the first hour in captivity? And why fail so many expeditions in search of this enigma of zoology? It’s not even endangered, the experts say, because an animal, which is a ghost, can’t be poached (jungle dwellers never find more than three squirrels per year in their traps in the whole of Africa), and if it survived such a long time on earth, the species must be blossoming. Congratulations, Flightless Scaly-Tailed Squirrel!