Scientist Luke Dollar was doing research on the African island of Madagascar when he discovered a lemur’s bones and tufts of its fur (lemurs are related to monkeys). Dollar’s guide was terrified—he thought the lemur had been eaten by the mysterious fossa. The guide was right, but it turns out he had little to be afraid of.

“Imagine a short, stocky mountain lion,” Dollar said of the fossa. The animal has many cat-like qualities, including claws and a set of fearsome teeth.

But the animal has some other, more unusual features. It has a nose like a dog’s, “a long tail it uses like a trapeze artists’ pole, and the ability to ‘fly’ through trees like a squirrel,” Dollar said. But the animal is not overly dangerous to people.

So what exactly is this animal? Not a cat or a dog, scientists say. The fossa is actually related to the mongoose.

Dollar’s research shows that the fossa hunts everything from lemurs and mice to wild pigs.

But until recently, scientists knew very little about this mysterious animal. That’s because the fossa is very good at hiding itself.

Learning more about the fossa could be important, however. The fossa is an endangered species.

The animal is found only in Madagascar, an island off the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. And fewer than 3,000 fossa remain.

Fossa are endangered because only 8 percent of Madagascar’s forest remains today. In fact, many of Madagascar’s animals have already gone extinct since people first came to the island 2,000 years ago.

One of those animals may have been a larger type of fossa. Dollar has found bones and other remains of a fossa-like animal the size of a tiger. It would have weighed more than 225 pounds (100 kilograms)! He said it “could definitely have taken people.”

Dollar still looks in the remote, unexplored parts of the forest with the “wild hope” that he might find one of these animals alive.