The intrepid Elizabethan adventurer recorded encounters with “little beasts like cats” and “coneys” as he sailed the Caribbean seeking Spanish gold. Although his piratical escapades earned him both a small fortune as well as a knighthood, one of his other legacies was to describe some of the strange creatures skulking on uncharted islands. New research published today reveals how some of the mammals identified by the first Englishman to navigate the world have finally been given modern scientific names.
Remarkably, it was studying the remains of crocodile feasts that has allowed academics to accurately document three species and one subspecies of mammal that roamed the Cayman Islands until Europeans arrived in numbers 300 years ago and sent the creatures hurtling towards extinction.
Experts from the Zoological Society of London, the American Museum of Natural History and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History were able to classify the newly named species by studying fossilised bones in academic vaults originally collected between the 1930s and 1990s.
The bones appear to have been digested by crocodiles and were gathered from caves, sinkholes and peat deposits and have been identified as two types of large rodent – named as Capromys pilorides lewisi and Geocapromys caymanensis – as well as a shrew-like creature, which has been named as Nesophontes hemicingulus.
During his voyage to the Caymans in 1586, Drake recorded creatures he spotted, describing them as “coneys” – an old English word for rabbits – as well as cat-like beasts. One theory about their presence is that although the Cayman Islands are separated from Cuba by more than 150 miles of open sea, the archipelago may have been colonised by animals travelling on rafts of vegetation before going on to evolve into unique species over a long time span.
Poignantly, the arrival of European settlers with their rats, cats and dogs saw the Caymans’ unique creatures wiped out around 1700. Out of 130 species of mammal found across the West Indies 500,000 years ago, including sloths, monkeys and rodents, only 13 survive today along with 60 species of bat.
Details of the new creatures are published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. One of the co-authors, Professor Samuel explained how understanding how the mammals vanished is vital for conserving those which remain.
He said: “Humans are almost certainly to blame for the extinction of these newly described mammals, and this represents just the tip of the iceberg for mammal extinctions in the Caribbean. Nearly all the mammal species that used to live on these tropical islands, including all of the native Caribbean sloths and monkeys, have recently disappeared.
“It’s vitally important to understand the factors responsible for past extinctions of island species, as many threatened species today are found on islands. The handful of Caribbean mammals that still exist today are the last survivors of a unique vanished world and represent some of the world’s top conservation priorities.”
Yet while the age of discovery witnessed by the likes of Drake and other explorers appears to be confined to the history books, scientists continue to add to our knowledge about the species with which we share the planet.
Another co-author of the paper, Professor Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History’s mammalogy department, said: “Although one would think that the greatest days of biological field discoveries are long over, that’s very far from the case.
“With only one possible sighting early in the course of European expansion into the New World, these small mammals from the Cayman Islands were complete unknowns until their fossils were discovered.
“Their closest relatives are Cuban – how and when did they manage a 250-km journey over open water?”