In 1998, Honduras counted its mammals. 8 years later, 227 species emerge

A raccoon crossing a road or a squirrel moving through a garden hardly seems like the sort of sighting that would leave a gap in a country’s scientific record. Yet in Honduras, even familiar mammals have sometimes been poorly documented on paper. For nearly 30 years, there was no single modern account showing where the country’s mammals occurred. Information existed, but it was scattered between museums, reports, field notes, scientific papers and records made by people outside formal research. Bringing those fragments together has now taken eight years of work. The resulting review documents 227 native mammal species, while also showing how much remains uncertain about animals that live in some of Honduras’s most familiar landscapes.The review does not restrict itself to Latin names and distribution records. It also records names used for mammals by Indigenous peoples and rural communities in Honduras.That reflects a wider issue in wildlife research.