An elusive California mammal has just been photographed alive for the first time

Crazy.

The shrew hasn’t been trapped or recorded in two decades, Subramanyan told SFGATE: “So it’s very possibly one of the most poorly known mammal species in California.”

There’s a reason why nobody had photographed a living Mount Lyell shrew. Shrews have incredibly fast metabolisms and will die if they don’t eat every two hours, Subramanyan said. To catch a living shrew, researchers need to monitor their traps constantly. If mammalogists set an overnight trap, they’ll wake in the morning to find a dead shrew. Jain, Forbes and Subramanyan slept for no longer than two hours at a time, checking the traps regularly. At night, temperatures reached 15 degrees.