[conception]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

It took years to discover the location for the SARS bats. China is large, undeveloped and has lots and lots of bats.

[baja_blast]

But it took months to find the intermediate host: Paper from 2003 finding the virus that spilled over into humans in an animal sampled in the market https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.