A very small sneaky creature

The mysterious shrew of sonnerath 

   When we think of striking mysterious species we often think of rare herbivores, large predators of legends, majestic sea creatures or wonderful birds that once sang, but not all mysterious beings are large, some are tiny, like the case we will see today, Thank you for reading, I hope you support, without further ado, let's get started.

The sonnerath shrew, with the proposed name Diplomesodon sonnerati, is a species of shrew that was first described by the naturalist, writer and colonial administrator Pierre Sonnerat of Pondicherry at some undetermined location during 1813.

It was described as larger than other shrews and lacking a musky odor, with males being shiny black with a white band or patch in the middle of the back, while the females also had the white spot but were gray, Sonnerat He described the shrew as 5 1/2 inches from head to base of tail and 1 inch tail and a 29 mm white line.

2 centuries of mystery 

Since there is no preserved specimen of the species and it is only known from this single illustration, both its taxonomic description and its generic location remain in doubt, It is not known what type of shrew it is and basically they have searched for a cavity where they have not found it, and it was not until 200 years later that received a scientific name from Anthony Cheke, which was first published in 2012, but the description was not considered valid by some as the holotype was not explicitly designated to ningún género existente, so it was described again in 2018, the species was provisionally placed in the genus Diplomesodon, a genus that is nested within the family Crocidura, according to a molecular phylogenetic study from a few years ago.

However, the species was then tentatively placed in its current genus based on the observation that the only other visible species with a similar pattern, being the Central Asian piebald shrew (Diplomesodon pulchellus), taking into account that no specimen matching the species has since been found, The species is believed to have become extinct since then. 

 The American Society of Mammalogists considers D. sonnerati to be a subspecies of the piebald shrew, If it exists, although it will be difficult to verify, usually the mysterious creatures become the smallest, since due to their small size and obtuse distributions they cause many to get lost in the true mystery of the sands of time, Let's hope one day we will be able to find these lost species and be able to study them in depth.

[Reading links]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piebald_shrew

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Mammalogists

https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soricidae

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piebald_shrew

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnerat%27s_shrew