The Adorably Creepy Gliding Mammal That’s Basically Just a Big Flap of Skin

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…neither. It’s actually the colugo, a gliding mammal with no sense of decency.

In 16th century Scotland, the alchemist John Damian, who was known to expense a suspicious amount of whiskey in his experiments to find the elusive philosopher’s stone, decided he could fly. He fashioned a pair of wings from feathers and “took off from the lofty battlements of Stirling Castle for a flight to Paris.” He didn’t make it to France, but he did plummet a few feet away from the castle and break a leg. The failure, he later claimed, was due to using feathers from chickens, which can’t so much fly, when he should have used eagle feathers instead.

Really, the problem had more to do with mammals like us not being cut out for flight. Well, except for bats. There are, though, critters like sugar gliders and flying squirrels, which can pull off some pretty solid glides. But compared to the adorable and little-known colugo, they got nothin’. This is the most accomplished mammalian glider of all—on account of being essentially a giant flap of skin—capable of soaring an incredible 200 feet from tree to tree. Its expansive membrane, known as a patagium, stretches from its face to the tips of its digits all the way back to its tail, so “geometrically, it has the greatest surface area that you can have between those limbs without actually evolving an entire wing like bats did,” said conservation biologist Jan Janecka of Duquesne University.

With undeniable cuteness and way too much skin, the colugo is an aesthetic conundrum, like adorable old people.

With such a beautifully evolved body, the colugo, also known misleadingly as a flying lemur (more on that later), spends its nights leisurely gliding through the forests of Southeast Asia. Their skeletons, while not nearly as frail as those of bats, are thinner and more elongated than that of a squirrel, reducing their weight while increasing their surface area. And their huge eyes, Janecka says, gives them not only good night vision, but excellent depth perception—no insignificant advantage when you’re coming in for a hard landing on the trunk of a tree.

Colugos are such adept gliders that mothers have no problem bringing their babies along for the ride. And they’ll do so for quite some time, for their young are born highly underdeveloped. They’re not as helpless as, say, marsupial young ‘uns, which enjoy the comfort of their mother’s pouch, but certainly not as developed as most mammals.

The colugo’s unique comb-shaped teeth, which may help in feeding or grooming, but only when it’s not a skeleton though.

Still, the newborns cling to mom as she sails around the rainforest in search of food, mostly sap and leaves and shoots. And as if the colugo’s flappy skin weren’t bizarre enough, its teeth are shaped like little combs. This could be helping them in some way to feed, says Janecka, or may play a part in grooming to snag parasites on their skin. That’s right. Colugos may be brushing their hair with combs built right into their faces.

Unfortunately, beyond watching mothers sail around with their babies, we don’t know much at all about the colugo’s social life. And efforts to keep them in captivity have largely been for naught. Remember that these are creatures used to gliding up to 200 feet, and good luck finding that kind of space in a zoo. “Basically their enclosures weren’t large enough to allow them to glide long distances,” said Janecka. “And because they couldn’t glide, they couldn’t keep their patagium well maintained and dry enough.” They developed infections on their skin, perhaps from a fungus, and died.

Ironically enough, it’s too much space in the wild that’s threatening some colugo populations. Deforestation can strand species in islands of trees, but even if loggers just thin out spots in the forest, it’s big trouble for the colugo. They’re the most accomplished mammalian glider on Earth, sure, but if there’s too much space between trees, the colugo runs the risk of sinking right to the ground. And as you can see below in the video from National Geographic (they strapped a camera to a colugo—enough said), the creature’s extra skin makes it all but worthless when anywhere but the canopy. It’s an easy target in a habitat packed with predators.

Of Parasites and Primates

Because colugos tend to live in isolated habitats and because they insist on emerging only at night, much of what we know about them comes from anecdotal evidence. Case in point: colugo doo-doo. It … moves.

“I’ve seen some videos of fecal material that they’ve dropped where there’s so many worms it’s actually moving,” said Janecka. “It’s squirming around.” The colugo digestive tract, it seems, has a really, really high parasite load. “And that whole dynamic, whether it happened to be in a population that has a lot of parasites or it’s something that’s more normal for the colugos that they’ve learned to deal with, that’s one of those unknown questions at this point.”

What is abundantly clear is that the colugo has a very long digestive tract, which makes sense for a creature that eats trees. That stuff takes a whole lot of time to digest. But such long guts could also be acting as a sort of mansions for parasitic worms, which have lots of room to make themselves comfortable. Until someone starts studying colugo turds at length, though, we’ll have to leave this one a mystery.

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