KUCHING, Aug 25, 2014: A team of scientists from the Natural History
Museum of Berne, Switzerland, has discovered two new animal species in the
tropical rainforests in northern Sarawak.
Bruno Manser (picture, left) in Sarawak in 1999.
The two new
species are a spider of the goblin spider genus Aposphragisma, named
Aposphragisma brunomanseri, and the Murud black slender toad, Ansonia vidua.
Aposphragisma brunomanseri has been collected by a
Dutch-Swiss research expedition in Western Sarawak in the 1990s and has been
described during a recent international research effort by zoologist Marco
Thoma from Berne’s Natural History Museum.
The species epithet is dedicated to Bruno Manser, a Swiss
environmental activist and ethnologist, most famous for his support of the
nomadic Penan people against the destruction of the pristine rain forest in Sarawak.
The Murud black slender toad, Ansonia vidua, has also
been discovered in Pulong Tau National Park during an international expedition
directed by Dr. Stefan Hertwig from the Natural History Museum of Berne and
Berne University’s Institute for Ecology and Evolution.
The new species has been discovered during a night
excursion near a river at an altitude of 2150m at the Gunung Murud mountain in
the region where Bruno Manser went missing.
Bruno Manser was born on Aug 25, 1954 in Basel, Switzerland. From 1984 to
1990, he lived in Sarawak with the Penan, South East Asia’s last nomadic
hunter-gatherers.
Ansonia vidua (picture, right) has been found in the Gunung Murud region, where Manser disappeared in May 2000 .
After returning to Switzerland, he founded the Bruno
Manser Fund, a human rights and environmental organization that champions the
rights of Sarawak’s indigenous peoples.
Manser has been missing since his last trip to Sarawak in
May 2000.
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