Two new bandicoot species identified from museum specimens after decade-long study
A ten-year investigation of museum specimens has identified two previously unrecognized bandicoot species and revealed that South Australia once supported three Isoodon species rather than one.
A decade-long research project led by the Western Australian Museum has identified two additional bandicoot species that were hiding in plain sight among museum collections, while also revealing that the brown bandicoot family tree in Australia is considerably more complex than previously understood.
The first new species, the little brown bandicoot (Isoodon microtis), once lived in South Australia but became extinct around a century ago. The second, the New Guinea brown bandicoot (Isoodon moresbyensis), had been classified as merely a subspecies of the northern brown bandicoot until this study demonstrated it warrants full species status. Both discoveries emerged not from fieldwork in remote wilderness but from systematic re-examination of specimens that had been collected, catalogued, and stored in museum drawers for decades.
The research also upends what was known about historical distributions. South Australia was previously thought to have supported only a single Isoodon species, but the study revealed it once hosted three — including the now-extinct little brown bandicoot and the quenda (Isoodon fusciventer), which had a much wider historical range extending into South Australia than its current distribution would suggest.
Beyond the new species, the work described seven new subspecies across existing brown bandicoot species. The cumulative effect is a substantial revision of a mammal group that had been considered relatively well-understood — a reminder that museum collections, properly interrogated with modern analytical methods, can yield taxonomic discoveries without a single new specimen being collected in the field.
The extinction of Isoodon microtis within roughly a hundred years of scientific recognition also illustrates a pattern common to Australian mammal conservation: species disappearing before they were even known to be distinct. The little brown bandicoot was not overlooked because it was rare or inaccessible, but because it resembled its relatives closely enough to be lumped in with them until detailed morphological and genetic analysis proved otherwise. That it survived long enough to enter museum collections, yet not long enough to be studied as a living population, marks a narrow window that has now closed.