NC professor on team that discovers new flying squirrel

WILMINGTON, N.C. -- A North Carolina researcher is part of a team that has discovered North America's newest mammal.

Media outlets report University of North Carolina Wilmington associated biology professor Brian Arbogast is part of a team that recently discovered there are three, not two, species of flying squirrels in North America.

Arbogast and a graduate student assembled a large sample of specimens from the Pacific Coast and used genetic markers to compare them to the northern flying squirrel. 

This new species, Humboldt's flying squirrel, is the continent's newest mammal. Humboldt's flying squirrels are a cryptic species, meaning it looks physically identical to another but is genetically different.