By Natalie Kainz - NBC News
An expedition through an unpredictable and dangerous mountain range in the Indonesian province of Papua has led to the rediscovery of a critically endangered egg-laying mammal that had not been seen for more than 60 years.
For researchers on the Cyclops Expedition, the Attenborough long-billed echidna – a strange-looking creature covered in padded hair and with powerful claws – is a symbol of biodiversity that can be rediscovered in the Cyclops Mountains in Indonesia.
The nine-week expedition included a team of 25 people who had to battle malaria and earthquakes. To illustrate the difficulty of the journey, one student researcher had a leech stuck in his eye for 33 hours.
The Attenborough Long-billed Echidna.Expedition Cyclops
"I like to think of climbing those mountains as climbing a ladder whose rungs are made of rotting wood, with railings lined with spikes and thorns, and whose structure is wrapped in vines and hit by falling rocks," said team leader James Kempton of Oxford.
The less than 90-square-mile mountain range has been the target of illegal hunting for years. It is the only habitat of the Attenborough long-billed echidna, which is considered critically endangered and is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species.
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Kempton's team deployed more than 30 cameras in search of the mammal, suspecting it was out there because of the holes in the ground the animal makes to look for worms. In the last images of the last SD card, on the final day of the expedition, they finally found him.
"The first feeling was one of great relief, because we had put in a lot of effort and thought they were there, but we needed concrete scientific proof," Kempton said. "Extreme euphoria followed."
Kempton said the echidna's critically endangered status is unlikely to change. The animal is not protected under Indonesian law.
The effort to change this situation is one of the reasons the Cyclops Expedition included more than six local partners in its research project, Kempton explained. These include indigenous groups, students and Indonesian government organizations.
Kempton hopes the results will help local partners raise funds to research and protect the Cyclops Mountains.
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The Attenborough long-billed echidna is also one of five guardians of a very unique and fragile evolutionary history, dating back more than 200 million years, Kempton said.
Echidnas are monotremes, meaning they are part of the only group of living mammals that lay eggs instead of giving birth to their young alive, he explained. There are only five species of monotremes: the platypus and four species of echidna.
"For a biologist, just the idea that that branch could go extinct would be a great tragedy," Kempton said. "It's an evolutionary story that can never be recovered."
Rediscovering the Attenborough long-billed echidna was just one of the goals of the Cyclops Expedition. The researchers also set out to investigate the origins of the biodiversity of the Cyclops Mountains. They came back with hundreds of new species of insects, at least two new species of frogs, and a new species of shrimp that lives on land and in trees.
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According to Kempton, the unique geological origin of the Cyclopes Mountains is one of the main drivers of the region's biodiversity. The mountain range used to be islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As Earth's continents came together, they collided with the continent of New Guinea to form the mountains.
The Cyclops Expedition also rediscovered the Mayr's honeyeater, a species of bird that had not been seen for 15 years.