Word: muntjac
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...early May, scientists from HKU and Shenzhen's Center for Disease Control decided to test animals sold in one large food market in Shenzhen, including house cats, hares, beavers and the Chinese muntjac, a small deer. When they examined sputum, feces and blood of the masked palm civet, they hit pay dirt. All six of the civets tested, according to Professor K.Y. Yuen, head of the microbiology department at HKU, carried huge amounts of a coronavirus strikingly similar to the SARS agent. The scientists sequenced its genome and found the two viruses to be nearly identical. The World Health Organization...
...this century. But MacKinnon's beast was just the first of the wonders to emerge from Vu Quang and adjoining forests in Vietnam and Laos. In the past two years scientists have also found evidence of what appears to be two new species of deerlike creatures -- the giant muntjac and the quang khem -- and a novel species of fish resembling carp. Since exploration is still in its early stages, hopes are high that many more discoveries will follow. The area is "a biological gold mine," says MacKinnon, who has spent 25 years as a field biologist in Asia. Says Colin...
...animals remain elusive, known mostly through their bones and skins. But a team of British and Laotian fieldworkers under contract to New York's Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) say they have taken blood samples from a live specimen of one of the creatures -- the giant muntjac -- in a menagerie owned by a Laotian military group. If they are correct, studies of the captive animal could confirm the claim made earlier this year by Vietnamese scientists and MacKinnon concerning the giant muntjac. MacKinnon analyzed a skull brought to him by Do Tuoc and Shanthini Dawson, an Indian biologist. It resembled that...
Nonetheless, the Vu Quang ox, giant muntjac and slow-running deer might have come to the attention of the world much sooner had Vietnam and Laos not been isolated by wars and trade embargoes. For many years, local hunters and even Laotian forest officials have used antlers taken from the animals as hat racks or as parts of ceremonial altars, unaware that these trophies represented species new to science. Indeed, MacKinnon found among the unsorted bones in the collection of Hanoi's Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources some skulls of the slow-running deer that had been gathering dust...
...common feature of the three newly discovered animals is their primitive characteristics, suggesting that they have remained essentially unchanged for aeons. The slow-running deer has simple horns that remind Arctander of a Viking helmet. The giant muntjac has large canine teeth that deerlike animals used in fights long ago, before they evolved elaborate antlers. All three animals have braincases that are relatively small in proportion to their size. Taxonomist Groves says the Vu Quang ox seems somewhat similar to the hemibos, an extinct creature that lived in India 5 million years...