A field biologist who trudged through a soggy, leech-infested forest in search of a long-lost relative of humans and apes returned with malaria, blood poisoning and the first photographs of an animal no scientist had ever seen alive.
"For a week, I couldn't move," Bernhard Meier of Ruhr University in Bochum, West Germany, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.But he recovered, and his sighting of the hairy-eared dwarf lemur in Madagascar has been described as one of the most important rediscoveries of a mammal in the past decade.
"I went three times to that forest to find that animal, although I already knew it was there," he said.
An old man in a nearby village had told him about it.
To get to the forest, near Mananara in northern Madagascar, an island country off the east coast of Africa, "you need to hike three days, long and strong," Meier said. "Nothing is dry after a few kilometers because you need to cross many big rivers and creeks" containing leeches.
"The leeches are not dangerous. Most people say, `Oh, leeches, I don't want these plum-sized, ugly, satisfied leeches on me.' But the mosquitoes are dangerous. They transmit malaria."
Five preserved specimens, the first collected 115 years ago, are held in museums. But until Meier's discovery, researchers had no idea whether the creature still existed.
The first complete description of the animal, known to scientists as Allocebus trichotis, will be published shortly in Folia Primatologica, a scientific journal. Meier made the discovery in April, but it is only now being reported.
The rediscovery of the lemur (pronounced LEE-mur) is important because it is the only surviving species of an entire genus of lemurs that have disappeared, said Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International in Washington, D.C., and a primate specialist.
"If you lose a species, there are close relatives around," he said. "If you lose a genus, that's worse." The discovery of the hairy-eared dwarf lemur is "one of the two most important rediscoveries of mammals in a decade."
The other was the rediscovery of the soft-spined porcupine in Brazil in 1986, he said.
The lemur is brown and shaped like a mouse, with a body 5 inches long and a 7-inch, furry tail. It weighs no more than 3 1/2 ounces.
"Allocebus is the smallest primate species in existence, except during the dry season when the mouse lemur is not fat and is smaller," Meier said.
The lemurs of Madagascar are scientifically important because they are a group of primates that evolved in isolation during the millions of years that the other primates - monkeys, apes and humans - were evolving elsewhere.
"In effect, Madagascar is a giant experiment in alternative evolution," the New Scientist, an English journal, has said.
Meier emphasized that the importance of the discovery also lies in the attention it focuses on preserving the forest where the lemur dwells.
"It is one of the last patches of virgin, lowland rain forest, with huge trees you can't imagine, 50 meters (about 160 feet) tall," Meier said.