The olinguito, a new  mammal has been discovered...and it's pretty adorable.

A small, carnivorous animal from South America arrived at a zoo in 1967. Ringerl was thought to be an olingo, an orbareal mammal that looks like a cross between a teddy bear and a housecat with a little raccoon thrown in, so zookeepers put little Ringerl in with the other olingos.

But he wouldn't breed. Like, at all. Ringerl just wasn't interested in the ladies at all. He was sent from zoo to zoo, and still...nothing turned him on.

Now scientists know why- he wasn't an olingo. He was an olinguito, which is the first new carnivorous species that has been discovered in the Western Hemisphere in about 35 years.

For almost a decade, scientists have been researching and traveling around the globe to make sure theolinguito and olingo are separate species. The little critter proved hard to categorize-but the new mammal was officially announced today.

"A few new mammals are discovered each year, but these are mainly bats, shrews, and rodents: small animals that can hide pretty well," Roland Kays, a zoologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, told press. "There aren't nearly as many carnivore discoveries - especially not one as cute as the olinguito."

"It's exciting that the olinguito is finally having its day," he said.

Unfortunately, this finding underscores the fact there may be many other new mammals in the South American rainforest, which is under threat,that may never be discovered.

 "We hope that this discovery will be an exclamation point on that idea that these forests are important and need to be protected," says Kays.

The hunt began when a scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Kristofer Helgen, noticed that not all olingos looked alike and wondered if the funny-looking ones were another species altogether. He began researching, and found samples collected in Colombia in 1951 that were marked olingo but had fur that was red, not grey, like olingo fur. He then studied samples marked "olingo" from museum archives worldwide-and found that many were a different species altogether.

He enlisted the help of Kays and C. Miguel Pinto to try to find the olinguitos in the wild. They went on a three-week trip to the jungles of Ecuador to try to find the creature that had, for decades, evaded scientists.

They found it the first night, simply by looking into the trees.

"You have to go at night, and then you just have to look up," says Kays.

Seven years of DNA testing, confirming, writing, rewriting, testing, and retesting later, they're publishing their paper. They were worried another scientist would make the same discovery first.

 "We were worried that we would be scooped," says Kays. "And that would be a disaster - a personal disaster."

However, they weren't, and their research about the new mammal will be published in a special issue of the journal ZooKeys.

At one point, they compared their data to DNA registered as olingo in GenBank.  Funnily enough, it was the DNA of an olinguito-an olinguito named Ringerl from a zoo.

Larry Heaney, curator of mammals at Chicago's Field Museum, says it also highlights the importance and value of museum archives.

 "As more specimens accumulate, it becomes possible to see things that couldn't be recognized previously," Heaney said.

He added that there is still a lot to be discovered.

 "There's an awful lot we don't know about basic diversity of mammals," Dr. Heaney said. "There are unquestionably lots and lots of species of mammals that we don't know about."

Surprise is a familiar theme to the scientists on the paper: in 2008, the researchers compared their findings to the olingo DNA registered in GenBank. What they found there was what Kays called a "funny twist" to an already unusual saga: it turned out that the olingo catalogued in that database was in fact an olinguito - an olinguito named Ringerl.

What do you think of the new mammal, olinguito? Sound off below!