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Striped Possum (Dactylopsila trivirgata)

by JR Kinyak on August 5, 2008

in Marsupials

click image to enlarge

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Nocturnal, arboreal, and marsupial, the striped possum, who lives in Australia and New Guinea, is about the size of a squirrel. This fellow munches and lunches on insects, flowers, leaves, fruit, small invertebrates, and sweet local honey. If you’re out and about in an Australian forest of a summer evening, listen for rustling and crunching sounds overhead, and watch for falling leftovers: you may be in the presence of a striped possum.

Thanks to the striped possum and the BBC, I have just learned a new Britishism: the verb “to winkle,” which means to extract or obtain something with difficulty. Striped possums use their longer fourth fingers to winkle grubs out of rotten wood.

Here’s a nice local news feature on striped possums in the Fort Wayne zoo: Wild on WANE.

Consecutive days of mammals: 4
Record: 16

Tagged as: words

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Monito del Monte (Dromiciops australis)

by JR Kinyak on May 16, 2008

in Marsupials

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One of my goals as the first year of the Daily Mammal comes to a close was to have drawn every order of mammals by June 3. If my calculations are correct, that’s 10 orders (out of 28 or so, depending on who’s counting; we’ve been leaning heavily on the carnivora, primates, and rodentia orders, I think). This one, Microbiotheria, caught my eye because in that order there’s only one family…one genus…and one species. This guy, the monito del monte (little mountain monkey), is the last of his kind.

Weighing in at about as much as a dollar in quarters, the monito del monte (let’s call him MDM, shall we?) makes his home in part of Chile and a sliver of Argentina. MDMs are marsupials, and in looking for pictures of them, I found notices of a recent scientific discovery. You see, in Australia, they’ve found the 55-million-year-old fossilized remains of a creature called the djarthia, which is Australia’s oldest known marsupial and likely the ancestor of all of the marsupials living in Australia today.

What does that have to do with the MDM? Well, while scientists had long suspected that the MDM was closer kin to the Australian marsupials than to the few living in the Americas, finding these fossils proved it. (This has implications for theories about where and when marsupials evolved and from where and to where they migrated; some scientists believe that marsupials evolved in South America and went to Australia via Antarctica when the three continents were part of Gondwana, and this would indicate that the MDM went back to South America at some point before the continents split up, then got stranded there, basically.)

Anyway, I won’t get into the whole train of investigation that set me on tonight (phylogenetics, cladistics, systematics…). It may be enough to know that the tiny monito del monte is cute, that it’s “secretive,” according to Science Daily, and that, in the colder parts of its range where it hibernates in the winter, it stores up enough fat in the base of its tail to double its weight in a week. Some Chilean Indians call it the colocolo. Finally, here’s a new (to me, and maybe to you) word: scansorial, meaning “adapted to or specialized for climbing.” In a sentence: “Some people think the monito del monte is arboreal, but since it doesn’t really spend all its time in the treetops, it’s probably more accurate to call it scansorial.”

Science Daily: “Primitive Mouse-like Creature May Be Ancestral Mother of Australia’s Unusual Pouched Mammals”

Two weeks straight of mammals! I have a full weekend and a business trip on Monday, so this streak will likely end soon—let’s celebrate it while we can!

Consecutive days of mammals: 14
Previous record: 11

Tagged as: discovery, evolution, words

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CONTEST! Five Deer Mice: Aztec Mouse, California Mouse, Canyon Mouse, Gleaning Mouse, Hooper’s Deer Mouse

by JR Kinyak on April 7, 2008

in Rodents

April 19: Daily Mammal 24-Hour Mammal Marathon 2! Details later this week.

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Those of you who have been following the Daily Mammal from the start know how daunting the rodents are. Nearly half of the 5,000 named mammal species are rodents, and as Ivan T. Sanderson says in Living Mammals of the World, “whole slews of these look almost exactly alike.” Not only are there are thousands and thousands of them, something I had not considered when I decided to begin this project, but there aren’t very good photos of a great many of them. A while back, I drew a set of five sleeping dormice, and found it heartening to check several rodents off the list at once. Here’s another of those multi-mouse drawings. This time we’re tackling five deer mice (major hantavirus carriers), of the Peromyscus genus.

I didn’t have photographs of a single one of these mice. Instead, I had photographs of Peromyscus species that are much more common in the US, and I had very detailed descriptions of these five species from the species accounts in Mammalian Species, which I download in PDF from Virginia Hayssen’s website. Now, let me tell you, I do not as yet speak the language of zoology, but I’m going to learn it. There are standard names for describing animals’ fur, or pelage, as we mammalogists call it: ochre, buffy, tawny, and a wash of brown may all mean tan to you and me, but not to those whose eyes are trained to discern the nuances. Would my biologist readers let me know where I can get a chart or something that shows what those colors really are? I read that Munsell Soil Color Charts are used for describing pelage—is that where these names come from? I’d like to know.

Anyway, in drawing these mice, I had only the scientific descriptions to go on, and only my experience with acrylic paints to help me decipher the meaning of the colors. (Well, that and the fact that I’ve known three cocker spaniels named Buffy.) Here’s where you come in.

CONTEST: I’m going to type, below, some hints from the descriptions of these mice. The first person to identify in a comment to this post which of the five is which wins this drawing, matted and ready for framing. Ted is not eligible. Here we go.

Aztec mouse (P. aztecus):

  • Dorsal coloration is pale ochre mixed with black
  • Sides are reddish
  • Underparts are light buff
  • A black orbital ring is present
  • Size is medium

California mouse (P. californicus):

  • Annulations are not thoroughly concealed
  • Color is generally blackish brown above, sides ochraceous-tawny, venter pale olive gray to buffy brown
  • Largest species of the genus in the United States

Canyon mouse (P. crinitus)

  • Feet white
  • Dorsal pelage silky
  • Dorsal individual hairs lead-gray at base, succeeded by ochraceous to buffy subterminal band, and tipped with brown or back; dark grayish bases of hairs sometimes visible through buffy to pale grayish shade of dorsum
  • Hairs of forehead, nose, and face appearing slightly more grayish than body
  • Venter white
  • Size small to medium for genus

Gleaning mouse (P. spicilegus)

  • Unworn pelage has upperparts rich, tawny approaching ocherous rufous, dusky and dusky-tipped hairs uniformly distributed throughout upperparts
  • Black or nearly black orbital ring extends posteriorly into a grizzled area between the eye and the base of the ear
  • White feet
  • Tail blackish-brown above, white below with coarse annulations
  • Medium in size for the genus

Hooper’s deer mouse (P. hooperi)

  • Upper parts grayish with faint to moderate wash of brown
  • Underparts pale cream
  • Hind feet and lower legs whitish
  • Medium size for genus

Good luck!

Tagged as: about drawing, ivan, mouse, multiples, words

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Newly Described Mammals Week: Alpine Long-Eared Bat (Plecotus alpinus)

by JR Kinyak on February 21, 2008

in Bats,Theme Weeks

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Here’s another one that was discovered to be a species through DNA, at least I think that’s what happened. I’m sorry to say that I’m a little too bushed to figure it all out right now. I’ll leave that to you, if you care to download the PDF of the 2002 article that described this little guy for the first time. Plecotus alpinus, my friend, I am sorry that your roll of the 5,000-sided die came up this month, when I cannot give you the time I ordinarily (I hope) would be able to, but it had to happen to someone.

Here is a fact I learned while researching Mr. Alpine Long-Eared Bat, though. See the long, sort of triangular-shaped things on the front of his ears? Those are called tragi (singular tragus). The word comes from the Greek tragos, or goat, which my dictionary explains thusly: “with reference to the characteristic tuft of hair that is often present, likened to a goat’s beard.” I think it’s likely that the triangular-shaped things we have in front of our ears are also tragi, although neither we nor the Alpine long-eared bat have the characteristic tuft of hair.

Homepage of Andreas Kiefer, one of the professors who first described this bat

Tagged as: bat, discovery, dna, words

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Sand Cat (Felis margarita)

by JR Kinyak on January 26, 2008

in Carnivores

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Apologies for the delay in getting this cat up. I was on a business trip this week and wasn’t able to post.

The sand cat is a mysterious, solitary, nocturnal creature that lives in the Sahara, on the Arabian peninsula, and in central Asia. They are quite well adapted to their desert homes, with large outer ears to protect from blowing sand, thick fur to handle cold nighttime temperatures, pale coats for camouflage, and neatest of all, wiry black fur on the bottoms of their feet to let them walk in sand without sinking and protect their feet from heat. This hair, however, also makes them hard to study, as it renders their footprints nearly invisible.

I learned a lovely new word in researching this cat: isabelline, which means sandy grayish-yellow. (There’s a strange, likely apocryphal legend about the origin of this word that relates to one or another Queen or other royal named Isabella refusing to change her underwear to protest something. Another possibility comes from the Arabic word for lion, as isabelline is a lion kind of color.)

This mammal is sold. Find another one to take home with you!

Tagged as: cat, words

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24 Hours: Domesticated Donkey (Equus asinus)

by JR Kinyak on December 22, 2007

in Mammalthons,Ungulates


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Hi Mom! Here’s your donkey! It’s too bad no one requested a lamb and a cow and a baby human, because this baby donkey looks like he’d fit right in at a nativity scene.

I just realized, when I looked up the Latin name for donkeys, that the word asinine means, literally, ass-like, in the same way canine means dog-like and feline means cat-like and ovine means sheep-like.

Tagged as: horse, names, words

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Bongo (Tragelaphus eurycerus)

by JR Kinyak on August 23, 2007

in Ungulates


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The Bongo is a large African antelope. Both males and females have “lyre-shaped” horns. (I love that description—lyre-shaped.) Their numbers are decreasing, and they’re threatened by the destruction of their forest habitat. One idea that might help bongos is the establishment of wildlife corridors that would let them safely travel from one national park to another. To learn more, visit the African Wildlife Foundation’s site.

Tagged as: antelope, threats, words

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