New Pig Species Found in Vietnam's 'Lost World'
Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises
3/26/97
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: New Pig Species Found in Vietnam's 'Lost World'
Source: c FOX News Network 1997 comments@foxnews.com
c Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved
Date: 3/26/97
LONDON -- A so-called lost world on the border between Vietnam and Laos
has yielded yet another new species of animal, this one a primitive
wild pig, researchers reported on Wednesday
DNA tests showed the pig, Sus bucculentus, was only distantly related
to other pigs in the region, said Colin Grove of the Australian
National University in Canberra.
Grove said the pig had been described more than 100 years ago but then
became lost to science.
A living version was never seen by scientists.
"We here report its re-discovery in the Annamite Range in Laos, an area
which is becoming famous for the discovery of new and previously
undescribed large mammals," Grove and his colleagues wrote in a letter
to the science journal Nature.
Grove said he found one skull from the pig in Beijing's Academia
Sinica, with century-old documentation.
"A new specimen of Sus bucculentis, a partial skull of a juvenile male,
was obtained from indigenous hunters in the Annamite Range, Laos, in
January 1995," he added.
They did DNA tests on muscle tissue left on the skull and found a
"remarkably" large difference in the DNA between it and other wild and
domestic pigs in the region.
The Vu Quang area has already yielded several spectacular wildlife
finds, including the discovery in 1992 of a deer-like animal known as
the saola or Vu Quang ox, and a new freshwater fish last September.
"These conclusions underline the significance of the Annamites as a
biotically unique region where primitive taxa, long extinct elsewhere,
have been able to survive into the late 20th century," Groves wrote.
The Vietnamese government and environmental groups say the region's
forests are threatened by loggers. According to the World Wide Fund for
Nature, Vietnam has only 19 percent forest cover today compared to 43
percent 50 years ago.