Hedgehogs, Erinaceinae, are a distinctive group of spiney insectivorous Mammals found across Eurasia and Africa, but absent from Australia and the Americas. Their most notable features are their spines, which are enlarged hollow hairs, and ability to role into a ball, presenting only these spines to the outside world. There are five extant genera of Hedgehogs (a number of extinct genera are also known in the fossil record, including one from North America). The genus Atelerix is found exclusively in Africa, Paraechinus in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, Hemiechinus in Central and South Asia, Erinaceus across Europe, the Middle East and much of Asia, and Mesechinus is restricted to eastern Asia.
Hedgehogs of the genus Mesechinus, known as Forest Hedgehogs, are found in China, Mongolia, and the Russian Far East, where they are found in semiarid and dry steppes, semideserts, cold-temperate deciduous and temperate deserts, warm-temperate deserts, grasslands, deciduous broad-leaf forests, and subalpine and low-elevation coniferous forests. Formerly, all known species were restricted to the cold habitats of northeastern China, Mongolia, and the Russian Far East, but in 2007 a new species Mesechinus wangi, was described from the tropical and subtropical rainforests of Yunnan Province, in the southwest of China, opening the posibility that other species in the genus might be found in warmer climates.
In a paper published in the journal ZooKeys on 28 November 2023, Zifan Shi and Hongfeng Yao of the Collaborative Innovation Center of Recovery and Reconstruction of Degraded Ecosystem in Wanjiang Basin at Anhui Normal University, Kai He of the Key Laboratory of Conservation and Application in Biodiversity of South China at Guangzhou University, Weipeng Bai of the Institute of Nihewan Archaeology at Hebei Normal University, Jiajun Zhou of the Zhejiang Forest Resources Monitoring Center, Jingyi Fan, also of the Collaborative Innovation Center of Recovery and Reconstruction of Degraded Ecosystem in Wanjiang Basin at Anhui Normal University, Weiting Su and Wenhui Nie of the State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution & Yunnan Key Laboratory of Biodiversity and Ecological Security of Gaoligong Mountain at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Shuzhen Yang of the National Nature Reserve of Mount Tianmu, Kenneth Onditi and Xuelong Jiang, also of the State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution & Yunnan Key Laboratory of Biodiversity and Ecological Security of Gaoligong Mountain at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, and Zhongzheng Chen again of the Collaborative Innovation Center of Recovery and Reconstruction of Degraded Ecosystem in Wanjiang Basin at Anhui Normal University and the State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution & Yunnan Key Laboratory of Biodiversity and Ecological Security of Gaoligong Mountain at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, describe a new species of Mesechinus from Anhui and Zhejiang provinces in eastern China.
The new species is named Mesechinus orientalis, where 'orientalis' means 'of the east', in reference to it having been discovered in eastern China. The new species is described on the basis of seven specimens collected in southeast Anhui and northwest Zhejiang provinces. They are small-bodied Hedgehogs, reaching slightly under 190 mm in length. Their spines have four colour rings, two-thirds of the length is white at the base, followed by a 3–4 mm black ring, a narrow light ring, and a black tip. The species appears to be sexually dimorphic with regard to colour, with all known females having reddish fur, while all known males are greyish, although Shi et al. are cautious about asserting this with any confidence, due to the small number of known specimens.
A genetic analysis found that Mesechinus orientalis is the sister group to the pairing of Mesechinus hughi (found in central China) and Mesechinus wangi (from southwest China). It also found that the most recent common ancestor of all members of the genus Mesechinus was likely to have lived about 1.71 million years in the Early Pleistocene, with Mesechinus orientalis probably diverged from the common ancestor of Mesechinus hughi and Mesechinus wangi about 1.10 million years ago, with those two species having diverged about 740 000 years ago.
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