Scientist On A 'Pokemon Go' Kind Of Hunt For Elusive Squirrel-Like Species

Thousands of millennial are on the hunt for Pokemons, thanks to the latest fad, PokemonGo. But while people around the world are hunting for elusive, fictional creatures, scientists are hot on the trail of a fascinating real-life species.

This elusive, scaly-tailed #squirrel has never been seen alive: https://t.co/UCehGmWC8F #catchemall

— Green Atom (@greenatomnet) August 16, 2016

The creature, an ancient, squirrel-like thing with fur and paws but with a scaly-bottomed tail, had been eluding scientists for more than a century. CNN even noted that researchers seem to have been playing a real-live game of PokemonGo with it. There had been no success in tracking down the creature, named Zenkerella insignis - until now.

Dr. Erik Seiffert, a scholar from the University of Southern California wrote about the mysterious species in the latest edition of PeerJ journal. The paleontologist, who discovered and has named plenty of long-dead animals usually doesn't hunt for modern ones. The Z. insignis, however, is a special case, as there is very little that is known about the rodent.

Seiffert's interest in the rodent started during a dig in northern Egypt, when he found several fossil bones from a rodent that roamed the earth around 37 million years ago, getting particularly interested in the limb bones. He dug through known literature in comparing the bones with the elusive Zenkerella, but discovered that nobody actually saw the species alive. In fact, there had only been 11 examples of it in museum collections, none of them complete. There had been no DNA sequencing either, making it one of the least-studied mammals on Earth - to the point that scientists actually know more about long-extinct species from 37 million years ago than a species that still lived on earth today.

The Zenkerella is actually more commonplace in the west coast of Africa, where villagers catch them in snares periodically. Not knowing their scientific significance, they'd just throw the bodies out, as these animals were tough and not good for eating. When they finally got hold of the creature, scientists realized that they are not related to gliders, as they originally thought, but they were more like "living fossils," as they haven't changed at all since they first roamed the planet 31 million years ago.

Little is known about these animals, but with the dead specimen, scientists believe that they will be able to study them further.