Namdapha Flying Squirrel
Known from a single specimen. Never seen alive by a scientist
No confirmed photograph exists
Location
Namdapha National Park, Arunachal Pradesh, India
Overview
The Namdapha flying squirrel exists in scientific literature as a single adult male, collected by a local hunter near the Namdapha River in 1981 and examined by mammalogist G. U. Kurup. It's a large flying squirrel — body the size of a domestic cat, with the membrane stretched taut from wrist to ankle for gliding between trees. No scientist has ever seen it alive. No camera trap has ever captured it. No second specimen has been collected. Everything known about this animal fits on one page.
Why haven't we found it?
Namdapha is one of the most biodiverse parks in Asia, and also one of the least surveyed. Flying squirrels are nocturnal and arboreal — they vanish into the forest canopy and are rarely detected even in areas where they're common. The single specimen's location, deep in the park near the Myanmar border, is difficult to access. It's entirely possible the species is abundant and simply never encountered on the few research expeditions that have reached its habitat.
Reasons to keep looking
- 1
No follow-up survey specifically targeting this species has ever been conducted — its absence from records reflects the absence of effort, not of the animal.
- 2
Namdapha's forest canopy remains largely intact. The habitat the 1981 specimen came from still exists.
- 3
A 2007 mammal survey of Namdapha reported locals describing large flying squirrels consistent with the species' size and coloring.
Things worth knowing
- 1
The species is named Biswamoyopterus biswasi after Indian zoologist Biswamoy Biswas, who described several northeastern Indian mammals.
- 2
The 1981 specimen had a distinctive dark brown upperside and pale underside, different from other large Indian flying squirrels, which confirmed it as a new species.
- 3
Namdapha National Park is one of only four places on Earth that hosts tigers, leopards, clouded leopards, and snow leopards simultaneously — the flying squirrel is the park's least-known large mammal.
- 4
A relative, Biswamoyopterus laoensis, was described from Laos in 2013 — entirely from a carcass at a bush-meat market — suggesting these squirrels are present but deeply hidden.
- 5
The park's borders are under encroachment pressure from illegal logging and settlement from Myanmar, threatening the forest fragments that may hold the squirrel.