This week I have an adorable mystery object for you. Any idea what this cute little critter might be?
As ever, you can put your questions, thoughts and suggestions in the comments below. Have fun with this one!
Friday mystery object #443
Zygoma
Adventures in natural history collections
Zygoma 
is that an Oerzon? (sorry, don’t know a cryptic description in English for it. I can in Dutch but no one would get it…)
Stekelvarken?
That indeed is Dutch but not cryptic. Cryptic reference to the Dutch name would be something like “prehystoric central star”
Same Family, but different branch.
baby puercoespin en español, but the tail seems too long… certainly prehensile.
That’s no baby!
Is that the color it was before it was stuffed, or has it faded?
Joe VanS notes the tail, which does look long and skinny for the North American relative of the critters everybody so far seems to have referenced, but don’t some South American species have prehensile tails?
You can pretty much guarantee it’s faded…
I wish its large soft squishy nose survived taxidermy better. It’s highly boopable. It’s unfortunate one of its other prominent features isn’t well preserved either. But I’d know that dexterous tail anywhere.
Hummmmmm…..
So. I thought we had it narrowed down to one or two families (Wikipedia says that between the two there are 58 species). So I tried looking up individual species. One (Brown Hairy Dwarf somethingorother) was illustrated in Wikipedia by a picture I thought looked like Paolo’s specimen. Looking again (and at the photo credit saying it was in the Natural history Museum in Dublin), I think it IS Paolo’s specimen.
So it is! Same pose on same tree. Amazing.
Busted!
Sorry. I tried to be a LITTLE bit cryptic.
The whiskers and facial hair are striking.