There are a lot of things that Filipinos should be proud about its country, one of which is that it is home of several unique species.
In a fifteen-year study by a team of American and Filipino authors that has been published at the scientific journal Frontiers of Biogeography, they found that 93% of Luzon Island’s land mammals can be found nowhere else.
56 species of non-flying mammal species lives on the island, 52 of which live nowhere else in the world. The researchers themselves discovered 28 of the species, 19 of them had been formally described in scientific journals already, while nine are currently “in the works.”
“We started our study on Luzon in 2000 because we knew at the time that most of the native mammal species on the island were unique to the island, and we wanted to understand why that is the case. We did not expect that we would double the number already known,” Lawrence Heany, the project’s leader and part of the Negaunee Curator of Mammals at The Field Museum in Chicago, told Science Daily.
Eric Rickart, part of the team of researchers and based at the Natural History Museum of Utah, said that there are individual mountains on the island that have about five species of mammals that live nowhere else.
“That’s more unique species on one mountain than live in any country in continental Europe. The concentration of unique biodiversity in the Philippines is really staggering,” he added.
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