This week I’ve decided to give you a mystery squee from the Dead Zoo:
Any idea what this fuzzy little critter might be? As usual you can leave your questions, thoughts and suggestions in the comments box below.
Zygoma
Adventures in natural history collections
Zygoma 
Cutie! Face like a meerkat but paws like an arboreal thingy. What a lovely birthday treat for me. Goes away to think and cheat as much as possible
Right, best guess is that this is a genus of tiny anno domini public transportation.
Fantastic clue and spot on 🙂
If my wild guess about the species is correct, it’s specific name is derived (in the native language) from one of those regarding whom older fashioned women used to say the best ones were always taken, in honour of one such scientist who studied this genus.
Belated Happy Birthday!
A kind of lemur, maybe one of the dwarf or mouse lemurs?
eenie meanie deci digiti, arborealiti islati africani.
¡feliz cumple palfeyhombre!
Thanks Joe. And I’m glad to see that you too are on the same track as me re the ID of this mystery specimen.
oops: noctorialitus
Maybe a little bus-y-body?
I want one!! 🙂 Does this dwarf have a fat tail?
Or does it have hairy ears? It might be hairy eared instead of fat tailed, lol.
Its tail is neither fat, nor does it have hairy ears – I believe it is deeply offended by those suggestions 😉
Hedge infant?
Are the eyes of this taxidermy specimen the correct size? Or did someone get a couple of slightly too big buttons out of the box?
And I note the prominent vibrissae. Cats and dogs and mice and their relatives have vibrissae, but I don’t hunk of primates as having noewothy ones. Or do Strepsirhines?
O.k., at least some Strepsirhines have prominent vibrissae. And the fingers look a lot more primate-ish than carnivoran.
Looking for more clues… The ears on this one are tiny. (If I’m interpreting RobinBirra’s “Hedge infant?” right, I’d say no: that one has much bigger ears.)
But there are a lot of other Strepsi species to choose from. Some (“Diminutive Capucin” as a not too cryptic hint for some of them) have small ears, though so far I haven’t found an image that quite matches this one.
Oh. And I’ll bet the fur has faded with the years.
Agree, I think, on dim’cap. Relying on faded fur hypothesis to have masked the otherwise distinctive line of white running through the centre of the face. I have a target species based on a youtube video but, by all accounts this genus is particularly hard to separate into species by visual id alone. (If I’m right about what it is at all.)
The hair has definitely faded…
My first guess was a low speed Dr. Seuss environmentalist.
Does the fact that we don’t see the tail area indicate that it has one or that it doesn’t have one?
No, I just couldn’t get a nice picture of the whole thing – it has a tail.