Its fossilized bones were found in a cave-like depression in a remote mountain in Cebu 50 years ago in 1958 by mining engineer Michael Armas who was looking for phosphates. He kept the bones, then in 1995, he showed them to a friend, Dr, Hamilcar Intengan, a Philippine-born physician at Chicago’s St. Bernard Hospital who was visiting his family in Cebu. Intengan took the bones to Chicago’s famous Field Museum for identification.
It took Larry Heaney, the Field Museum’s curator of mammals, only 15 minutes to recognise that the bones were those of a mammal and were those of a pygmy and not a baby’s and one which had never been found on Cebu. By examining the pattern of the teeth Heaney, a specialist 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. Smaller animals would be more successful breeders under such conditions.
Heaney himself, 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, documented their findings in the Journal of Mammology.
Heaney dated Bubalus cebuensis to the Pleistocene during the Ice Age, some 100,000 years ago. He said that the Cebu buffalo lived 100,000 years ago when most of the island was covered by tropical savanna, a collection of grassland and scattered trees that formed an ideal habitat. He surmises that it probably disappeared when the Ice Age ended and the savanna disappeared as it got warmer and wetter.
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, he adds.
He is at pains to point out that “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.”
The Bubalus cebuensis is one of only two known species of dwarf buffalos that have evolved in the Philippines. The other is Bubalus mindorensis), popularly known as tamaraw, which is 20% bigger and is found on the island of Mindoro. While bubalus cebuensis has been extinct for a long time, bubalus mindorensis is on the verge of extinction due to the destruction of its forest habitat. If the present rate of destruction continues, it might not be long before the tamaraw goes the way of its relative, Bubalus cebuensis and the next generation of Filipinos would know the tamaraw through only photographs and bones preserved in natural history museums.
[2007]
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