Rare animal photographed alive for the first time in history

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Meet the Mount Lyell shrew, who's ready for its close-up – at long last.

More than a century after its discovery, a previously unseen small mammal has been captured by camera, fully alive.

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No images can be found of the Mount Lynell shrew, and a search on Google was unsuccessful, turning up nothing but sketches and maps.

’ amid climate change.

Researchers Vishal Subramanyan, 22, Prakrit Jain, 20, and Harper Forbes, 22, have taken the first-ever photographs of a shrew alive.

Collected near Lee Vining in the Eastern Sierras, the California Academy of Sciences found five small creatures with beady eyes in November.

They measured between nine to ten centimeters long and weighed only about three grams.

"This species of shrew is considered a species of special concern, yet there is startlingly little scientific knowledge about it.”

These species are thought to be extremely susceptible to the effects of climate change, primarily because their habitats at high elevations are vanishing rapidly.

Vishal and his team worked non-stop to find this animal, staying up late at night to take care of and watch over the traps.

Scientists who study mammals recently documented and took pictures of five Mount lynx shrews in a high desert area and shared their research findings on Thursday.

He and his friends thought of the idea after picking up small mammals on a school outing.

They became utterly enthralled with tiny mammals and resolved to get up close and personal with a Mount Lyell shrew.

by American biologist Clinton Hart Merriam in A.D. 1902.

"No shrew has been caught or documented in twenty years," Subramanyan stated.

It's probably one of the least familiar mammal species in California.

Researchers do know what contributes to their elusive nature.

On top of being as long as a pencil, these shrews have a very high metabolism, needing to eat something every two hours or they'll die.

This means that, when wildlife analysts set an overnight trap and manage to catch a shrew, they'll probably find it dead the next morning.

So, Jain, Forbes, and Subramanyan slept for no more than two hours at a time and frequently checked the traps they had set near streams and wetlands.

The traps made by the group were simple, not involving any technical devices - they dug holes and placed plastic cups in them as obstacles and filled the cups with cat food.

The Mount Lyell shrews' menu apparently includes cat food, as one was caught within the first two hours.

Subramanyan stated that capturing footage of the elusive shrew is "really important for cataloging the diversity of life on a planet that is rapidly changing."

It's predicted that the Mountain Lyell shrew could lose about 90% of its territory as the release of climate-changing greenhouse gases by humans continues.

There are very few good photos of California's population of shrews, Subramanyan pointed out.

By capturing images of the animals that have never been photographed before, we can help the public gain a better understanding and emotional connection with them.

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