Pygmy tarsiers rediscovered in Indonesia

This video says about itself:

Pygmy tarsiers

A team led by a Texas A&M University anthropologist has discovered a group of primates not seen alive in 85 years. These furry gremlin-looking creatures are about the size of a small mouse and weighing less than 2 ounces, have not been observed since they were last collected for a museum in 1921.

From Reuters:

Tiny, long-lost primate rediscovered in Indonesia

Tue Nov 18, 2008

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists for the first time in more than eight decades have observed a living pygmy tarsier, one of the planet’s smallest and rarest primates.

Over a two-month period, the scientists used nets to trap three furry, mouse-sized pygmy tarsiers — two males and one female — on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in central Sulawesi, the researchers said on Tuesday.

They spotted a fourth one that got away. …

As their name indicates, pygmy tarsiers are small — weighing about 2 ounces (50 grammes). They have large eyes and large ears, and they have been described as looking a bit like one of the creatures in the 1984 Hollywood movie “Gremlins.”

They are nocturnal insectivores and are unusual among primates in that they have claws rather than finger nails.

They had not been seen alive by scientists since 1921. In 2000, Indonesian scientists who were trapping rats in the Sulawesi highlands accidentally trapped and killed a pygmy tarsier.

“Until that time, everyone really didn’t believe that they existed because people had been going out looking for them for decades and nobody had seen them or heard them,” Gursky-Doyen said.

See also here.

And here.

The tiny spectral tarsier, one of the shortest primates in the world, has been filmed hunting at night in the jungle of Sulawesi, Indonesia, here.

Sangihe tarsier: here.