image credit: Mark Gurney ccHidden away in the cloud forests of Colombia and described as half cat, half teddy bear, the olinguito is the first new carnivore to be discovered in the Western Hemisphere in 35 years.
The creature has been wrongly identified for 100 years, despite having been spotted in the wild, tucked into museum collections and even exhibited in zoos. But now scientists at the Smithsonian Institute have confirmed the carnivorous mammal is a new species and have said it is 'an incredibly rare discovery in the 21st Century'.
