The mountain paca primarily inhabits higher Andean montane forest regions in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.

This paca has coarse fur without underfur, dark brown to black on the upper body and white or yellowish on the underbelly.

It has thick strong legs, with four digits in the forefeet and five in the hind feet (the first and fifth are reduced); the nails function as hooves.

However, it has a low reproductive capacity and its numbers have been significantly reduced in recent years due to hunting and habitat destruction.

Cuniculus hernandezi Castro, López & Becerra, 2010 is a name coined for a proposed species of paca described as an endemic to the Central Andes in Colombia, the only place it has been identified as such to date.

[4] Héctor Ramírez-Chaves and Sergio Solari, in 2014, argued that the species is not an available name (nomen nudum) according to the rules of the current International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), due to imprecise definition of the taxon and lack of a type specimen.

Not only is the taxonomy blundered; the original research also used a faulty methodology with limited data to obtain their genetic tree, omitted to publish important results validating (or not) their conclusions, neglected a study of the availability of previously proposed names for pacas found in the region (old synonyms; i.e. C. serriae in Colombia and Venezuela), and presented no evidence with which to identify the taxon (even the illustrations lack identifications).