In 1998, Honduras last counted its mammals. Nearly 30 years later, 8 years of digging through 300,000 records reveal 227 native species

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.