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Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew (Rhynchocyon chrysopygus)

by JR Kinyak on October 11, 2011

in Other Orders

Golden-rumped elephant shrew (click image to enlarge)


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Here is the golden-rumped elephant shrew, which is also known as a golden-rumped sengi, or a yellow-rumped either one of those. It’s not actually related to the shrews, although it is related to the elephants, distantly. Some things I’ve learned about this fellow:

1. Translating its scientific name at the website of a zoology course at the University of Alberta, I see that this sengi’s official name means snout-dog golden-rump. (Pygos means rump, and is found in the word callipygian, “having well-shaped buttocks,” which is one of those words that middle-schoolers delight in discovering in the dictionary.)

2. The rump is golden for a reason. That pretty blond fur covers a padded area of super-tough skin. The idea seems to be that predators will be attracted to the golden glow and bite there, rather than somewhere that might hurt more.

3. The golden-rumped sengi lives only in a tiny area of coastal Kenya.

4. It’s number 46 on the EDGE list of the top 100 evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered mammals—in other words, this endangered species is particularly irreplaceable.

5. This elephant shrew is monogamous, which is quite rare for a small mammal, or indeed, any mammal.

6. It can be very difficult to distinguish between the members of the Rhynchocyon genus, also known as the giant forest sengis, in the field, but the California Academy of Sciences has a page dedicated to helping you tell them apart.

7. According to the American Society of Mammalogists’ species account of this elephant shrew,

“If mildly disturbed, Rhynchocyon freezes until the danger passes, or, if further disturbed, it walks away while loudly slapping the leaf litter with its tail every 1 to 3 seconds. If pursued, Rhynchocyon takes flight using a swift half-bound gait…hammering the leaf litter loudly with its rear legs, and producing a characteristic “crunch, crunch, crunch” sound as it disappears.”

8. The golden-rumped elephant shrew is diurnal, or active during the day, and spends its nights in a nest it builds on the forest floor. For some reason, it requires a new nest every other day or so. It builds the new nest in the morning, and the construction takes about two hours.

Below is Coco’s golden-rumped elephant shrew. See you tomorrow!

Golden-rumped elephant shrew by Coco, age 12

Tagged as: coco, elephant, endangered, names, words

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Random Week: Inland Forest Bat (Vespadelus baverstocki)

by JR Kinyak on April 13, 2011

in Bats,Theme Weeks

Inland forest bat (click image to enlarge)


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I had fun with the random rodents I drew the other day, so I’ve decided on a new theme week: Random Week! I put all the mammals I haven’t yet drawn in random.org’s list randomizer and for the next week-ish, I’ll be as surprised as you by what mammal I draw each day. (I only put in their genus and species names, not families or orders, so I’m more likely to be in the dark until I look them up.)

Today’s randomly selected mammal is an Australian bat, the inland forest bat, whose scientific name comes from a still-living zoologist, Peter R. Baverstock, who was born in 1948. I think this is my first mammal named for a baby boomer! Well, the first that I’ve noticed was named for a baby boomer. (Did they have a baby boom in the ’40s and ’50s in Australia?)

The inland forest bat is very small, weighing 3 to 7 grams, or 3 to 7 paper clips (thanks to Mrs. Beard, my third grade teacher, for that helpful comparison I’ve used my whole life). It lives throughout Australia in dry areas, roosting in hollow trees or abandoned buildings.

Tagged as: names, random

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Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana)

by JR Kinyak on April 10, 2011

in Primates

Golden snub-nosed monkeys (click image to enlarge)


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Golden snub-nosed monkeys live in central China, with the majority making their homes in the Sichuan province. They roam through mountain forests where snow covers the ground for half the year, eating lichens and other ploants and the occasional insect. They are endangered, and the IUCN tells us that the major threats to their continued existence are habitat loss and tourism-related activities.

I learned from the Eponym Dictionary of Mammals (I need a copy of that book!) that the roxellana part of the monkey’s scientific name comes from Roxelana, a Ukrainian woman who was captured and sold into slavery in the 1500s. She was put in the harem of the sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, where she became his favorite concubine and eventually his second wife. In his poetry, he called her his one and only love. Apparently, she had beautiful golden hair and a turned-up nose, just like these monkeys. But she probably didn’t have a blue face.

Tagged as: books, endangered, humans, names, threats

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Japan Benefit: コウベモグラ (Japanese Mole) (Mogera wogura)

by JR Kinyak on April 1, 2011

in Mammalthons,Other Orders

This week’s Daily Mammal drawings are of mammals of Japan, and they’re for sale, with the entire purchase price going to help people and animals affected by the earthquake and tsunami earlier this month. You can buy a drawing by me or by Coco, we can mat it or not, and no matter what you choose, half the purchase price will go to the American Red Cross and half will go to an animal shelter in Japan called Animal Refuge Kansai. If you don’t want our drawings, we won’t get offended—you can still help out by clicking the Donate button at the very bottom of this post. We’ll add your money to our fund. On to the mole!

Japanese mole (click image to enlarge)

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Researching this mole, I found a short story in the Paris Review by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese, called “Mogera Wogura.” It is a fantastic story, in both senses of the word, and it seems to be digging its mole claws into my mind. It’s strange and I suspect it will haunt me a while. Somebody else please read it so we can discuss it!

Japanese mole by Coco, age 12 (click image to enlarge)

Coco’s drawing has sold!

The moles are very common and have no major threats, which is great for the little fellows. I wonder about the origin of the Japanese mole’s scientific name, but I can’t find anything on it. It seems that the common Japanese word for a mole is mogura, which is pretty much a combination of this mole’s generic and specific names. Hmm. There is only so much I can learn, and this shall have to be a mole nomenclature mystery in my life, I imagine.

Tagged as: books, coco, humans, japan, names

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Two Beautiful Squirrels (Callosciurus prevostii, C. finlaysonii)

by JR Kinyak on March 16, 2011

in Rodents

Prevost's squirrel and Finlayson's squirrel (click image to enlarge)


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Well, mammals, we made it! Mammal Number 365 is here, with his buddy Number 364, ready to meet you and celebrate a year’s worth of Daily Mammals, completed on average once every four days, which doesn’t sound too bad, until you do the math and realize that at that rate, it will take me an additional 52 years to draw all the mammal species. In 52 years, I’ll be 85. Will you still be visiting my website? I hope so! (Will there still be websites?)

Thank you for visiting and meeting my mammals, even if I am a little slow in getting them to you. I appreciate every one of you wonderful viewers and readers, whether you post comments or not, whether you come once or every day, whether you’re related to me or a stranger. Thank you! This project is rewarding on its own, but it’s even better with company. Thank you, especially, for sticking with me through the long hiatuses.

I write today’s post from my bed, where I’m hopped up on oxycodone for my broken calcaneus. I don’t have my mammal books in here, so this entry will be a tad thin on facts. When I called these squirrels beautiful, I wasn’t bragging about my drawing. The Latin name of their genus, Callosciurus, means “beautiful squirrels,” and each species in this genus has striking colors or markings, like these two. Both of these species live in Thailand. Prevost’s squirrel also calls Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia home, while Finlayson’s hangs out in Cambodia, Laos (which is officially called Lao People’s Democratic Republic), Myanmar, and Vietnam.

Florent Prévost, whose name one of these squirrels bears, was a French naturalist and artist, and George Finlayson, namesake of the other squirrel, was a Scottish naturalist and surgeon. I’ve recently started looking up some of these mammals’ names in the Eponym Dictionary of Mammals, or rather its Google Books preview. It’s a new book, out in 2009, and it costs $65, which is not in my budget right now. My public library doesn’t have it, but it does have a copy of my other favorite resource for learning about the names of mammals, A.F. Gotch’s Mammals: Their Latin Names Explained. That one is from 1979 and is out of print. I know I’ve mentioned it several times on this site, and I check it out from the library every now and then.

Tagged as: books, names, squirrel

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Bushy-tailed Olingo (Bassaricyon gabbii)

by JR Kinyak on March 14, 2011

in Carnivores

Bushy-tailed olingo (click image to enlarge)


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Sadly, my long mammal-posting streak was broken yesterday…because I jumped off a rock and broke my calcaneus, the big bone at the bottom of the heel. It hurts like mad! But while I recuperate, I will try to keep up the mammaling.

Today’s mammal is the bushy-tailed olingo, which lives in Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Colombia. It is a procyonid, putting it in the same family as the raccoons, coatis, kinkajous, and their friends. The bushy-tailed olingo’s scientific name, Bassaricyon gabbii, comes from William Gabb (1839–1878), a paleontologist and geologist who collected natural history specimens in Central America for the Smithsonian.

The olingos caught my eye because of a characteristic Ivan T. Sanderson note on the genus in Living Mammals of the World:

“Of all idiotic scientific names for an animal this takes the cake: it means literally the ‘Fox-dog’ or ‘Dog-dog’ as bassara is an ancient Thracian word for dogs and foxes, and kyon meant a dog in classical Greek. The animal in question has caused a great deal of confusion in scientific records, completely bamboozles the nonspecialist, is usually overlooked, is seldom represented in museum collections, and yet appears to be fairly common.”

Tagged as: ivan, names

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Wrinkle-faced Bat (Centurio senex)

by JR Kinyak on February 28, 2011

in Bats,Theme Weeks

wrinkle-faced bat

Wrinkle-faced bat (click image to enlarge)


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When I drew this guy, I was working on a Mammal Mating theme week, but that was several months ago, and now I can’t figure out what’s interesting about the wrinkle-faced bat’s mating habits, except that scientists speculate that the wrinkled face may be related to sexual selection. Only the males have big neck flaps, and they emit a musky odor from their chin regions, and why would males emit a musky odor from their chin regions if not to attract females?

The flaps at the male bats’ necks are so big that when they’re resting, they flip the flaps up to cover their entire faces. I thought it might be to keep light out so they could sleep better during the day, but then I learned that they have translucent patches over the eyes! Pretty amazing.

This article from the Journal of Zoology (link is to a PDF) uses words like bizarre, extraordinary, unusual, exceptional, enigmatic, and dramatic in describing the bat’s strange face and head. The wrinkle-faced bat is frugivorous, meaning it eats fruit, and the article’s authors conclude that it’s likely that the shape of the head, anyway, is in service of the bat’s strong bite, which perhaps helps it eat harder fruits and therefore survive when weaker-jawed frugivores wouldn’t. Usually, when a bat has strange facial folds, it’s thought that the wrinkles help focus the bat’s sonar so it can better catch insects. But this fruit-eater obviously doesn’t need that kind of help. I read one theory speculating that the wrinkles could channel fruit juice into the bat’s mouth.

The scientific name Centurio senex means “100-year-old man.”

Tagged as: bat, evolution, mating, names

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