Unidan, AKA Ben Eisenkop, is an ecosystem ecologist who first rose to fame (infamy?) on Reddit by popping up in posts across the site, answering any queries and questions pertaining to biology and ecology. Eisenkop will be a columnist for Upvoted, where he’ll be spotlighting a new creature every week.

This wonderful little speckled fuzzball is a type of colugo, sometimes referred to as the taxonomic family which comprises the “flying lemurs,” though that name is a bit erroneous, as they do not technically fly, nor are they technically lemurs.

Instead, these guys, roughly the size of a very large squirrel, simply glide! Here’s a clip from the BBC filmed in Southeast Asia showing colugos in action:

Much like North America’s flying squirrels, colugos have large folds of skin between their limbs, which provide a huge surface area for which to glide between trees. In these trees, colugos feed on leaves, gum, sap and fruits, where they have evolved long digestive tracts in order to extract nutrition from the typically nutritionally poor supply that plants provide. The longer time plant material spends in the gut, the more time the colugo has to pull nutrition from it!

Lip Kee Yap/Wikimedia Commons

Again, while they aren’t lemurs, the reasons biologists in the past may have confused the two are understandable. Both lemurs and colugos have tooth combs (exactly what they sound like), both hop about clumsily and even superficially look like one another in some cases, minus the, well, gliding part.

Recent studies, published in Science magazine, however, have made the case that perhaps colugos are related to early primates such as lemurs. Using molecular and genomic analysis, these researchers have shown that colugos diverged from the primate lineage somewhere in the Cretaceous period!

…And diverge they did! In some respects, colugos almost seem to be more in line with non-placental mammals, as their young, similar to kangaroos, for example, emerge before they are fully developed.

These baby colugos curl up in their mother’s fur and skin folds and develop externally. This all sounds like a nice, comfortable existence until you remember that the average colugo mom is rocketing between trees!