The Cat-Fox of Borneo

Sometimes it's easy to get jaded about the world.  It seems like every inch of the planet has been thoroughly trampled, recorded, and uploaded to the internet.  The search for cryptids starts to seem a bit silly and old fashioned, like trainspotting, or collecting matchbooks.

However, it's important to remember that in fact the world still has many wild places in it, and animals still hide there.  Such is the case of the cat-fox, which is a new animal discovered in Borneo by World Wildlife Fund researchers in 2003.

The cat-fox was first discovered thanks to a trap camera, which caught two stills.  Both photographs were clear enough to easily determine that this was a new species, possibly related to the civet cat or the Fossa of Madagascar.  The animal resembles a cross between a cat and a fox (but you probably guessed that already).

The cat-fox lives in the high mountainous jungles of Borneo, which are covered in old growth forest and uninhabited.  It was photographed in the Kayan Mentarang National Park, which is mountainous, densely forested, and uninhabited.  No great surprise that an animal unknown to science could be hiding there, since the terrain is difficult and forbidding to say the least.

Another possibility is that this may be a sighting of a known but exceptionally rare animal called the Hose's Palm Civet.  The Hose's Palm Civet is known to science only through fifteen museum specimens, and a handful of recent photos from camera traps.  (Obviously the camera trap is becoming an invaluable tool in cryptozoology!  I really want to buy one some day, maybe then I could find out what's been raiding my compost heap in the middle of the night and making a terrible mess for me to clean up in the morning.)

A group of mammalogists has also speculated that the cat-fox is actually a species of giant flying squirrel.  This would explain why the animal is photographed with its belly so low to the ground.  They were also able to show numerous points of correlation between the cat-fox's morphology and that of a giant flying squirrel known to be native to Borneo (although also an animal which is very rarely sighted).

This national park is remote enough to house some of the world's most elusive and endangered animals, including the Clouded Leopard, the Flat-headed Cat, the Oriental Small-Clawed Otter, and the Sun Bear.  Unfortunately this may not be the case for very much longer.

In 2005 the World Wildlife Fund reported that the Indonesian government, in conjunction with a Chinese bank, wants to plant palm oil trees in the cat-fox's remote mountain stronghold.  The WWF is skeptical of the palm oil plantation scheme, and believes that Indonesia is trying to maneuver its way into stripping the giant old growth forest, selling the timber, and leaving the mountain flanks as bare as those in the rest of deforested Indonesia.  Unfortunately Indonesia has one of the worst recent records of deforestation in the world, due primarily to the avarice of the Indonesian government.