Ice Age carabao found in Cebu

Unknown to science until now, a new species of carabao has been discovered — 100,000 years late.

During the Ice Age, Bubalus cebuensis stood 2.5 feet and weighed about 160 kilograms. It was a mini copy of today’s adult water buffaloes that stand six feet and weigh up to a ton.

The dwarf buffalo is to a typical carabao as a pony is to a horse. And it is about a fourth smaller than its living relative, the hundred or so tamaraws that remain in Mindoro Island and nowhere else.

In 1958, Filipino mining engineer Michael Armas was looking for phosphates in a remote Cebu mountain when he found mysterious fossilized bones in a cave-like depression. No one could identify the bones which he kept.

In 1995 he showed the bones to a friend, Dr. Hamilcar Intengan, a Philippine-born physician at Chicago’s St. Bernard Hospital who was visiting his family in Cebu. Seeing the bones, Intengan volunteered to take them to Chicago’s famous Field Museum for identification.

Nearly 50 years later, the bones have been classified as an extinct species of a dwarf water buffalo. After making casts of the bones, the museum will return them to the Philippines.

The partial skeleton consists of two teeth, two vertebrae, two upper arm bones, a foot bone and two hoof bones.

Larry Heaney, the Field Museum’s curator of mammals, knew "within 15 minutes" that the bones were those of a mammal which had never been found on Cebu. Patterns on the teeth indicated it was a pygmy and not a baby.

Heaney, who specializes in Philippine fauna, established that the bones came from a smaller version of a buffalo.

Heaney is a world authority on the biological phenomenon called "island dwarfism" which traces size reduction to limited food supplies; the smaller animals would be more successful breeders, and genes favoring smaller stature would determine future generations.

Heaney, lead author Darin Croft of Case Western Reserve University, paleontologist John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History, and archeologist Angel Bautista of the National Museum of the Philippines, document their findings in the Journal of Mammology.

The smallest species of buffalo — the first evidence of a cattle being dwarfed — would have been lost to time "if not for the generosity of Mr. Armas and Dr. Intengan," said Croft.

"We probably never would have known about this extinct species. This discovery highlights the importance of making fossils available for scientific study."

Croft says the new species is the second known dwarf buffalo to have evolved in the Philippines. The other is the tamaraw (Bubalus mindorensis), a nearly extinct species found only in Mindoro that is about 20 percent bigger.

"Cebu is a smaller island than Mindoro," said Croft, "and 30 years ago Heaney postulated there might be a correlation between the body sizes of these dwarf animals and the size of the island they are confined to. The trend we see in the evidence is that the smaller the island is, the smaller the animal becomes."

Heaney said the Cebu buffalo lived 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene or Ice Age when most of the island was covered by tropical savanna, a collection of grassland and scattered trees that formed an ideal habitat.

It probably disappeared, he says, when the Ice Age ended and the savanna disappeared as it got warmer and wetter.

It is an example of how cattle can "island dwarf" — evolve into smaller versions of themselves, likely to survive smaller environments with less food, he said.

Heaney says the Philippines is a treasure trove of natural history — of the country’s 200 species of mammals, more than two-thirds are found nowhere else in the world. Only Madagascar has a higher percentage of endemic mammals.

"The concentration of unique mammal species in the Philippines is among the very highest in the world, but so is the number of threatened species," he points out.

"Finding this new species is a great event for the country," said Bautista in Manila. "It will spur us to new efforts to document the prehistory of our island nation where only a few fossils of elephants, rhinos, pig and deer have been found." – InterNews&Features