“We found it! We found it!” Why this photo is a sensation

James Kempton was sitting at his desk going through dozens of memory cards and as he was looking through one of the last of 80 different wildlife cameras, he suddenly jumped up, ran to his colleagues and shouted angrily: “We’ve found it! We found it!”

This is how Kempton described the moment he saw a recording of an Attenborough long-beaked echidna on the memory chip. The animal was last seen in 1961 and has since been considered extinct. The photo was taken on the last day of a four-week expedition led by scientists from the University of Oxford in Indonesia’s Papua Mountains in June and July, the Guardian reports.

“There was great euphoria and also relief after being in the field for so long and not receiving any reward.” he said.

Echidnas share their name with a Greek mythological creature that is half-woman and half-snake and are described by James Kempton’s team as shy, nocturnal cavemen who are notoriously difficult to find.

Kempton’s team also found the animal through a happy coincidence: They found the animals in a previously unexplored cave system, which was only uncovered when a team member fell through a moss-covered entrance.

“The reason they look so different from other mammals is because they are members of the monotremes, a group of egg-laying animals that split from the rest of the mammalian family tree about 200 million years ago,” Kempton said.

The species has only been scientifically recorded once, by a Dutch botanist in 1961. Another species of echidna is found throughout Australia and in the lowlands of New Guinea.

The echidna belongs to the local Indonesian culture. According to one tradition, conflicts are resolved by sending one party to the forest to search for the long-snouted echidna and the other party to the sea to find a marlin. Both creatures were considered so difficult to find that they often took decades or a generation to discover. But once found, the animals symbolized the end of the conflict and the return to harmonious relations. (meg)