California students capture palm-sized underground mammal alive on camera for the first time

A palm-sized mammal that lives underground in California has been caught alive on camera for the first time.

Three undergraduate students came up with an idea to capture the elusive Mount Lyell shrew, native to the Eastern Sierra Nevada region, as part of their fall 2024 project. Vishal Subramanyan, Prakrit Jain and Harper Forbes laid out over 100 traps last November and checked them every two hours, for three days and four nights, to photograph the tiny creatures.

"The hardest part of getting the photos was one, they're incredibly fast cuz they're always running around," Subramanyan told CBS News.