© National Park Service
A rare photo of a Sierra Nevada red fox, snapped by a remote camera trap in Yosemite National Park.
The elusive and rare Sierra Nevada red fox has been spotted in Yosemite National Park for the
first time in nearly a century, park officials said yesterday (Jan. 28).
Camera traps caught the sleek animal in a remote northern corner of the park on Dec. 13, 2014, and again on Jan. 4 of this year. The cameras were set up by wildlife biologists hoping to spot the red fox and the Pacific fisher,
Yosemite National Park's rarest mammals. The ongoing study is funded by the Yosemite Conservancy.
There hasn't been a verified sighting of the Sierra Nevada red fox inside Yosemite National Park since 1916, said Ben Sacks, director of the University of California, Davis Veterinary School's Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit. That year, two animals were killed in Yosemite's Big Meadows, northeast of El Portal, for the University of California, Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
"It's likely that the Sierra Nevada red fox has been in the backcountry of Yosemite in the last century, but they are rare enough and secretive enough that they haven't been encountered by anyone who has been able to document them," Sacks told Live Science.
Comment: A run down of the global reports featuring wild boar attacks on people for the past year: