This week I have a fuzzy mystery object for you to identify:
Any idea what this handsome little beast could be? I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Friday mystery object #486
Zygoma
Adventures in natural history collections
This week I have a fuzzy mystery object for you to identify:
Any idea what this handsome little beast could be? I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Zygoma 
Was there a band in the early 80’s who sang a song about being ‘Too Shy-shy’ who have a similar name (Damn! That’s another awful earworm for the day. Thanks Paulo!)
Hah! Not quite, but it is a close relative. Although I now have that earworm too…
I worked in a natural history museum for many years and we had a collection of retired taxidermied exhibit mounts that we loaned out to teachers to use in their classrooms. They were stored for a while in a glasswalled reception area and of course left in cars and windowed classrooms. Over time, they all faded into this exact shade of blonde. Thank you for the trip down memory lane, Paolo. (I have no guess… yet.)
Light damage to specimens is the bane of our collection, but this specimen is from elsewhere (details tomorrow). It is faded, but not as badly as it might seem at first, as the species is naturally a golden hue.
Oh, Paolo, where is its tail!
That is the correct question. 🌟
Not just the tail– the whole after-part of the body! It may be a trick of perspective, but it looks as if the hind legs are MUCH bigger than the forelegs. … Which doesn’t call any plausible candidate to my mind.
I think that’s a trick of the posture on the mount, so don’t let it distract you too much!
Body builder indeed… leg day?
arboreal as indicated by the pose or fossorial by it’s squat stature?
Definitely arboreal
It looks like a Carnivoran to me. Not a cat, dog, bear, or seal… So I’m going to guess Viverrid, which narrows things down to 33 species if Wikipedia’s count is right.
The Binturong and one of its close relatives (in the subfamily Paradoxurinae how did they get that name?) look as if they might have thigh-to-foreleg proportions like what the picture seems to show.
Funny you should mention the Binturong. Not a close relative, but they share a very distinctive feature!
Do they both smell like popcorn?
I’ve only encountered them in collections, so to me they both smell like mothballs…
Lol!!! My old museum smelled like Vapona. Living Binturongs do, however, smell like popcorn.