Posts tagged as:

taxonomy

Aardvark (Orycteropus afer)

by JR Kinyak on May 17, 2008

in Other Orders

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Here’s another order (Tubulidentata) that now contains only one family, one genus, and one species! Aardvarks live pretty much anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa that they can find ants and termites. They hunt the insects by smell, snuffling along the ground with their tongues sticking out. They’re nocturnal and solitary and live in underground burrows. In fact, if you’re an aardvark’s enemy and you’re going after it, it probably will escape you not by running away, but by digging a hole real quick.

In Afrikaans, the word aardvark means “earth pig.” It seems aardvarks are very strong. Here’s an evocative anecdote from Walker’s Mammals of the World:

It is an extremely powerful animal. In one case, a man with a firm grip on the tail of an aardvark in its den was slowly drawn into the burrow as far as his waist and finally had to relinquish his hold, despite the additional leverage afforded by two other persons.

And how about this:

Its eyesight does not appear to be good, since the aardvark frequently crashes into bushes, tree trunks, and other obstructions when running.

Bless their hearts!

Consecutive days of mammals: 15
Previous record: 11

Tagged as: names, taxonomy

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Assorted mammalian musings

by JR Kinyak on May 8, 2008

in Operations

• On June 3, 2007, the first Daily Mammal post went up. Almost a year ago!

• I was up until 3:30 am last night working on a spreadsheet that lists the Latin names and taxonomic situations of all the mammals of the world. (Don’t worry, I didn’t make that part, I downloaded it from the Smithsonian.) What I was doing was putting in the common names and the dates posted for the mammals I’ve drawn. I got them all in except for this latest mammalthon batch, and while I do feel a sense of satisfaction for having done that, I am very disappointed that I have drawn nowhere near the 366 mammals I should have. Luckily, my 14-year estimate was based on a rounding up of 13 and a half years, so I don’t need to change that prediction yet. But I have to get on the ball!

• My first goal for the few weeks left in this first fiscal mammal year is to hit half of the 366 mammals that we needed.

• My second goal is to draw at least one species from every order of mammals by June 3. Orders are the groups like rodents, primates, ungulates, carnivores, etc. There are 10 orders we haven’t covered, so unless one of them is extremely mysterious and no reference images can be found, that should be no problem. One of the remaining orders is represented by just one species!

• My goal for next year is to draw 365 mammals between June 3, 2008, and June 3, 2009. I think that hard as it is, it’s still worthwhile to try to draw one a day. I know there will be times—business trips, for instance—when it’s just not possible, but I can do mammalthons to make up for those times, maybe. Here is a quote from Andy Warhol (via Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project, one of my favorite blogs) that addresses this:

“Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.”

• In creating this spreadsheet, I got to go back and look at all my old drawings. My drawing has improved so much in just a year! (Imagine how good I’d get if I actually did draw every day.) I think right now I’ve plateaued, but maybe I’ll start an upward swing again soon. Here’s something funny I noticed. I’ve drawn three different kangaroo rats over the past year, and each time I didn’t think about the other ones I’d drawn. But look at the drawings. Every one is in the same position! And what’s up with the style of that second one (from Mammalthon 1)? Here they are; which is your favorite?:




Tagged as: about drawing, taxonomy

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Mammals of New Mexico Week: Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana)

by JR Kinyak on April 15, 2008

in Theme Weeks,Ungulates

The 24-Hour Mammalthon has been rescheduled. It is now on May 3, 2008. There are still several slots available, so look over in the right-hand navigation bar and reserve your mammal today. It’s for a good cause.

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The pronghorn is often called an antelope, but it’s not really an antelope. Another nickname for it is speed goat, but it’s not a goat, either. In fact, it’s in a class—or rather, family—of its own as the only member of the Antilocapridae.

There are antlers, like deer have, and there are horns, like cows and antelope have. Do you know the difference? Antlers are made of bone and are shed each year. Horns are made of compressed hair growing on a bony core and are permanent. Then there are what pronghorns have. Their horns are keratinous, like bovine horns, but they’re branched, like deer antlers, and pronghorns shed them each year like deer do. In fact, no bovines are known to shed their whole horns the way pronghorns do. This seems to me to be the main factor that’s keeping the pronghorn in its own separate family instead of among the bovines.

Before Europeans came to America, there were tens of millions of pronghorn here. Around the turn of the century, they were nearly killed off; now there are about a million left, it seems. The fastest land animal in the western hemisphere, pronghorn apparently evolved solely in North America, never migrating anywhere else. Ivan T. Sanderson has this to say:

Nothing at all like these animals is known anywhere; they are a solitary leftover from pre-glacial times, when their tribe was much more varied…In a matter of speaking, they are a sort of minor experiment in ‘antelopes,’ initiated by Nature and then dropped.

I take issue with the “minor” part. Seeing pronghorn on the flatlands of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico was one of the things I most looked forward to as a child when we’d drive from our house in Midland, TX, to see my grandparents in Tatum, NM. I have a vivid memory of seeing them jump over a barbed-wire fence, but everyone—including my dad and Ivan T.—says they can’t jump fences. It must have been a daydream.

This pronghorn, along with the rest of the New Mexico mammals this week, is dedicated to the memory of Maleta Scrivner, a dear family friend who loved dogs and desert animals.

Tagged as: antelope, humans, ivan, taxonomy

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Newly Described Mammals Week: Laotian Rock Rat (Laonastes aenigmamus)

by JR Kinyak on February 22, 2008

in Rodents,Theme Weeks

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“The coelacanth of rodents,” this Laotian rat is a member of a family scientists thought had been extinct for 11 million years. So those scientists must have been surprised when they found some for sale in a food market in 1996!

Actually scientists initially thought the rat was a member of a brand-new family and described it as such. Other scientists who excitedly read the 2005 paper that described the new family recognized its resemblance to the Diatomys fossils they studied, and released their own paper in 2006 making the claim that the Laotian rock rat is actually what’s called a “Lazarus” mammal. (Like yesterday, I don’t have the fortitude to decipher the scientific articles to figure out whether this claim still stands or not.) There is only one other mammal species known to have that long a gap in its fossil history.

The 1996 specimens were joined by more dead Laotian rock rats in 1998, but it wasn’t until 2006 that scientists saw a living one. You can see a photo here on the National Geographic site.

Tagged as: discovery, evolution, rat, taxonomy

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Newly Described Mammals Week: Bornean Clouded Leopard (Neofelis diardi)

by JR Kinyak on February 18, 2008

in Carnivores,Theme Weeks

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Hi, mammals! I’ve learned many things since I started on my quest to draw every mammal species on earth. The most recent: business trips and a daily drawing blog just don’t mix. I’ve been traveling a lot the past few weeks—a whole lot—and it doesn’t look to let up until this summer. Sometimes that means I don’t get to draw; sometimes that means I can’t post my drawings. Please stick with me, though: I’m just as committed to this goal as ever, and your visits, comments, and general support mean the world to me!

This cat is an example of another way new mammal species are “discovered.” Science has known about the clouded leopards that live on Borneo and Sumatra for quite a while, but always thought they were the same species as the clouded leopards that live elsewhere in southeast Asia. A scientist quoted in The Daily Mail, though, had a different idea:

“The moment we started comparing the skins of the mainland clouded leopard with the leopard found on Borneo, it was clear we were comparing two different species.

“It’s incredible that no one has ever noticed these differences.”

Isn’t it, though? DNA testing confirmed that not only were the two kinds of leopard completely different species, they were, all the articles point out, as different from each other as lions are from tigers. The new species was officially described in 2007.

I suppose scientists are busy people, and no one had bothered to really think about this particular cat and whether it was a subspecies or a species or just slightly darker in color because of geographical variance or what. But clouded leopards were first described in 1821, the Bornean subspecies in 1823. That’s nearly 200 years, people!

Science Daily: “New Species Declared: Clouded Leopard on Borneo and Sumatra“

Tagged as: cat, discovery, dna, taxonomy

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Newly Described Mammals Week: Gray-Faced Sengi (Rhynchocyon udzungwensis)

by JR Kinyak on February 15, 2008

in Other Orders,Theme Weeks

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In 2005, scientists studying giant elephant-shrews (another name for sengis) in Tanzania set a camera trap that caught (on film) a creature they weren’t expecting. Long-snouted and furry, it looked a lot like the black-and-rufous sengi, only bigger and with a gray face and a black behind. Sure enough, it turned out to be a brand-new species, first described in a scientific journal in 2006. It’s the first new sengi species to be found in the last 126 years.

The gray-faced sengi is the largest (known) sengi. It lives in a very small forested area of Tanzania’s mountains. Sengis were originally thought to be related to shrews, but now scientists seem to think they are actually related to elephants, aardvarks, and sea cows! Amazing! I think they’re beautiful and I love to draw their colors. I hope science finds many more of these guys in the next 14 years.

Conservation International: “Scientists Discover New Species of Giant Elephant-Shrew”
California Academy of Sciences: “A new species of giant sengi (genus Rhynchocyon)”

Tagged as: discovery, shrew, taxonomy

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Newly Described Mammals Week: Pygmy Three-Toed Sloth (Bradypus pygmaeus)

by JR Kinyak on February 14, 2008

in Other Orders,Theme Weeks

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This week, or for the next week, I should say, I’ll be highlighting mammals “discovered” in the 21st century. (More often than not, people who live where the mammals in question do have known about them forever; it’s scientists to whom the species are new, so I’m trying to use the word described rather than discovered where I can.)

Did you know that 95 percent of all animal species in the world are invertebrates? That means that the animals the average person actually considers animals—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians—make up only 5 percent of all the species on earth. Even though there are relatively very, very few mammal species to discover, even now, scientists haven’t found them all. (At least, I assume they haven’t. Maybe the GoldenPalace.com monkey will turn out to be one of the last mammals the scientific community finds. By the way, if you’re hoping we can avoid calling it the GoldenPalace.com monkey by using its scientific name, no dice: it’s Latin for “of the golden palace.”)

The pygmy three-toed sloth was first described in 2001. It lives in Panama and is, as you’d suspect, a smaller relative of the three-toed sloths we’ve met before on the Daily Mammal. Like its cousins, it sleeps three quarters of the day, moves very slowly, swims like a champ, and, I just now learned, has fur covered with algae to camouflage it in the forest. Pygmy three-toed sloths are very endangered; I suppose we should be grateful we got to meet them at all.

The pygmy three-toed sloth on ARKive
The documentary Hanging with the Sloths

Tagged as: discovery, sloth, taxonomy

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