Posted by: Loren Coleman on August 30th, 2011
The African Golden Cat (Profelis aurata) is a medium-sized wild cat distributed over the rainforests of West and Central Africa. It is a rare feline, but not a new discovery. It was first described within zoology by Coenraad Jacob Temminck in 1827.
Scientists tracking one of Africa’s most elusive and poorly understood animals say they’ve recorded a rare – and possibly the only publicly released – video of the species in the wild.
The video, recorded by a motion-activated camera placed in a Gabon forest, shows an African golden cat: a shy, medium-sized feline that ducks human contact and lives in hard-to-access parts of central African forests.
“As far as we know, it’s never before been filmed (in the wild) for … the public domain,” said Luke Hunter, president of Panthera, the conservation group providing most of the funding for the team that captured the video this year.
A motion-activated camera captured this image of an African golden cat in Gabon, Africa, 2011.
To see the 2011 video, go to CNN.
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013.