Tag Archives for Mammalia

Friday mystery object #391 answer

Last week I gave you this skull from the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

I think it’s quite a distinctive skull, so I didn’t provide a scale and I asked for cryptic clues to avoid spoiling the challenge.

The overall skull shape is fairly standard for an Artiodactyl, but while this specimen has no incisors in the upper jaw, there are fairly obviously empty alveoli that show where the teeth used to be. That means it’s not a member of the Ruminantia (the deer, antelope, cattle, giraffes and weird deery-antelopey type critters like chevrotains) since they all lack upper incisors.

That leaves the pigs, hippos and camels – and it’s clearly not one of the pigs or hippos.

The camel family is a bit odd. There are three wild species, but then an additional four entirely domesticated species. The proportions of this skull are a bit long for a Llama, Guanaco, Alpaca or Vicuña. That leaves the Dromedary, Wild Bactrian or Domesticated Bactrian camel as possibilities.

Dromedary skulls tend to have a horizontal nasal region then a steep rise to the braincase immediately behind the orbits, but this specimen has a more gentle slope running from the nose to the top of the braincase, so it’s Bactrian.

Unfortunately the Wild Bactrian camel is critically endangered and poorly represented in collections, so it’s hard to find enough comparative material to differentiate the wild and domestic Bactrians.

Well done to everyone who figured out that this is one of the double-humped ships of the desert. There were some great clues in the answers!

Friday mystery object #390 answer

Last week I gave you this specimen from the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

It came from a cabinet of cave bones, but Nigel Monaghan (Keeper of the Dead Zoo) wasn’t convinced that this specimen was actually found in a cave.

Partly that’s because it’s a fairly fragile specimen with poorly fused sutures – these don’t usually stay connected in cave deposits, but also because it’s from a species that you wouldn’t expect to find in the kind of caves that the rest of these collections came from. So what is the species?

I don’t think this is a very difficult one since I’ve done very similar specimens before (regular visitors should have had an advantage), so I was looking for cryptic or entertaining answers – and I was not disappointed. Tony Irwin got a great clue in, with a pun that reflected the genus:

I think we need to focus (did I spell that right?) on the shape.

It is of course the skull of a seal in the genus Phoca – and the blunt shape of the anterior portion of the auditory bulla suggests to me that it’s a Harbour Seal Phoca vitulina Linnaeus, 1758 rather than the very similar Spotted Seal, which has a slightly more accute angle on the anterior auditory bulla.

So well done to everyone who figured it out! Now we just need to figure out how it either got into a cave or (possibly more likely) got put into the wrong cabinet.

Friday mystery object #387 answer

Last week I gave you this fuzzy critter to have a go at identifying:

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As I suspected, it proved to be tricky – small mammal taxidermy tends to be difficult, especially when it’s old, faded and a species that isn’t familar to many people. This specimen is a great example of that.

I’d love to be able to give you some clues for identification, but if I’m honest few of the distinguishing features of this species are visible (sorry!). The distinguishing features are apparently: white eye-ring (no sign thanks to fading), gray-brown fur flecked with white hairs (again it’s too faded), and a short tapering tail (just about).

This is a Dibbler or Parantechinus apicalis (Gray, 1842), which is also known as a Freckled Phascogale, Freckled Antechinus or Speckled Marsupial Mouse due to it’s flecked appearance (when it’s not faded…). Of all the comments I think Goatlips came closest with a suggestion of Antechinus, which is the genus that this species used to be included in.

These tiny marsupial carnivores feed on a surprisingly wide variety of animals, including mice, birds and lizards.

The Dibbler was declared extinct just one year after this particular specimen came to the Dead Zoo in 1883, but a couple of populations were later found in Western Australia. They’re still endangered and have a very small range, largely limited to small offshore islands where introduced predators like cats and foxes haven’t managed to spread – yet.

Friday mystery object #383 answer

Last week I gave you this slightly mean mystery object from the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

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I say it’s mean because it’s just a small fragment from the tip of the lower jaw. It does have some pretty distinctive teeth in it, so it’s probably not the most difficult mystery object I’ve shared, but it’s also from a species in a group of animals that are quite poorly known.

That said, Chris Jarvis was the first to comment and got it right immediately. However, there was a lot of subsequent discussion about how to be sure, given the poor representation of comparative specimens available and the similarities between this species and others in the family. That family is the Ziphiidae, which are the the Beaked Whales.

These cetaceans are rarely seen due to their deep water habits, sometimes diving to depths of nearly 3km (although more usually around 1km) to feed mainly on deepwater squid that they detect using echolocation. Most of what’s known about them comes from strandings – which is where this mystery specimen comes from.

The males tend to be smaller than the females, but the males of most of the 21 Beaked Whale species have tusk-like teeth that they probably use to fight over females, although the behaviour hasn’t been recorded, only deduced from scars and the behaviour of other animals with similar sexually dimorphic characters (there’s an interesting paper on the evolution of the tusks by Dalebout et al. 2008 is you’re interested [pdf]).

The teeth occur in different parts of the jaw and have a different shape depending on the species, so the fact these are located at the tip of the lower jaw means quite a lot of the species can be discounted. If you want to be able to do the narrowing down easily I recommend an old and somewhat unwieldy to navigate, but still very useful online resource – the Marine Species Identification Portal. If you can work out the navigation you can find small line drawings of the skulls of all species in lateral view.

Once you get that far it becomes easier to search for more detailed images of the couple of species it might be, which can yield some great 3D scans to help you work it out. Both Chris Jervis and katedmonson found examples and shared the links in the comments. Here’s a nice one from the NHM, London:

This species (the Cuvier’s Beaked Whale) clearly has bigger tusks than the mystery specimen, which you can see as a scan on the excellent Phenome10K resource*. The mystery object is the distal portion of the mandible of a male True’s Beaked Whale Mesoplodon mirus True, 1913. So well done to Chris Jervis for being the first to get in with the correct identification.

It may seem a bit odd to have just this small portion in the Museum, but as far as records go they represented a managable identifiable voucher for the stranding of the species in Killadoon, Co. Mayo, Ireland back in February 1983. These days we ask for even less material to keep track of strandings – just a small skin sample will do as long as it’s collected and recorded following the guidance of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group’s (IWDG) Strandings Network.

These samples are stored in alcohol and form the Irish Cetacean Genetic Tissue Bank which is managed in partnership between IWDG and the Dead Zoo to provide genetic data for research into whales. It’s a fantastic resource, but I doubt that anyone could identify the species represented in the samples without access to a genetics lab. And that’s why I like bones best.

*A. Goswami. 2015. Phenome10K: a free online repository for 3-D scans of biological and palaeontological specimens. http://www.phenome10k.org.

Friday mystery object #380 answer

Last week I gave you this specimen from the “Unidentified” drawer in the collections of the Dead Zoo to try identifying:

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I don’t think anyone had much difficulty in identifying it, since it is quite a familiar and characteristic skull, but well done to everyone who worked out that this is a European Badger Meles meles (Linnaeus, 1758).

There are two other species in the same genus – the Asian Badger M. leucurus and Japanese Badger M. anakuma, so they also need consideration (skulls of all three species can be seen in this paper by Andrey Puzachenko). However, the Japanese Badger is a smaller and more delicately skulled animal and the Asian Badger can be distinguised by differences in the shape of the region around the bony bulbs that hold the ear bones (called the auditory bullae – in Asian Badgers they’re more obtuse and have a straighter lateral margin).

So apart from the distinction between two members of the same genus, this is a fairly straighforward specimen to identify, it makes me wonder why it wasn’t recognised in the collection? I think there are a couple of factors, which I’ll outline here.

The first is that the lower jaw (mandible) is missing. This is totally normal for almost any kind of animal skull you find, except these badgers, which have a well-developed bony process that locks the mandible into the long jaw articulation (known as the glenoid fossa).

Badger

Badger skull with mandible locked in place.

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Detail of jaw articulation showing the main features. Red = mandibular articulation, Blue = inside of glenoid fossa, Green = glenoid process that helps lock the lower jaw in place.

This captive mandible is a dead give-away when you see it, but it does mean that when it’s missing it can be confusing.

A mature adult European Badger like this (as indicated by the well-developed sagittal crest) would also normally have extremely extensive wear on their molar teeth, due to the abrasive grit in the gut of their main diet of Earthworms.

Molars

Extensively worn upper molars of an adult European Badger

But the mystery specimen has remarkably little wear on those massive molars. This suggests that it probably had a different diet than is usual for a Badger from northern Europe – and no, not mashed potatoes. The same species in southern Europe has a different diet to their northern counterparts, dominated by insects and fruit, so I wonder if the specimen was collected during someone’s holiday to somewhere in the Mediterranean?

[UPDATE 28th April 2020. Several people have kindly shared images of their badger specimens and it seems that the level of wear in my specimen is not as common as I thought. In one discussion the issue of soil type was raised and I think that may play a big factor. This specimen came from Devon, in an area with sandy soil. Other specimens from areas with muddy or silty soils showed much less wear. This may be coincidence, but it would make sense that Earthworms with coarser soil in their gut would be more abrasive to eat and therefore cause more dental wear. That would be fairly straightforward to test using museum collections. If this hypothesis about wear is correct, then the mystery specimen could be from anywhere with soils that aren’t too sandy.]

I hope you found that useful, or at least a bit of a distraction from lockdown. Stay safe!

Friday mystery object #378

This week I’ve gone for a slightly more artsy image for the mystery object than usual:

You can click on the pictures to get a large version, which you might find useful.

I foolishly forgot to measure the specimen or include a scale bar, so I’ll update with a length as soon as I get back to the specimen. Sometimes it’s nice to rely just on morphology, so let’s see if anyone can work out what this is before I provide more information. [UPDATE: it’s 84mm long]

Have fun!

Friday mystery object #377 answer

Last week I gave you this unidentified skull from Dublin’s Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

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It didn’t prove too difficult to narrow it down, with everyone recognising it as a mustelid and Rémi immediately recognising it as being one of the Martens. But salliereynolds and Chris managed to get it down to the species, which is a bit of work.

There are around seven living species in the Genus Martes, although the total number varies depending on the sources you read. They have very similar skull shapes, the same dental formula and very similar tooth shape. In my experience the main feature to differentiate them lies in the auditory bullae.

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There are some decent online resources with images of Marten skulls, so it is possible to get a handle on some options. Each bulla is a 3 dimensional structure that is inflated in subtly different ways that are really hard to describe.

In a previous post I had a similar specimen (the same species as it happens) as a mystery object and I compared some bullae, but alas the image I referred to has since been removed. However, the important point is that there’s only one of the Martens that seems to have an outermost lobe that has a well-defined anterior sulcus (a fissure towards the front edge). This feature makes me think that this is a European Pine Marten Martes martes Linnaeus, 1758.

Thanks for your help in working it out!

Friday mystery object #370 answer

Last week I gave you this really nice skull from the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

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It proved a little more tricky than I thought it would, but I shouldn’t have been surprised given the poor quality of the photo and the fact that the cranium isn’t properly seated on the mandible (as pointed out by Allen Hazen).

Of course, that didn’t keep you all confused for too long. The large sinuses and relatively undifferentiated and widely-spaced teeth – except for those large canines – suggest that this is the skull of a some kind of seal.

Jeanie and salliereynolds noted the large, depressed opening over the nasal region, which is definitely one of the most distinctive features of this species. However, it also misled in the first place, with discussion of the possibility of it being from an Elephant Seal taking over for a while.

However, salliereynolds got back on the right track, while on Twitter Ray Chatterji was on the right track from the start with his suggestion:

The Hooded Seal Cystophora cristata (Erxleben, 1777) is really weird – well, the male is. He has an inflatable bladder on its head and one nostril contains a membrane that he can inflate to show off to other Hooded Seals.

I find it hard to think of this as anything other than nature’s attempt at making slightly disgusting balloon animals.

Well done to everyone who worked it out – I have a couple of fun guest mystery objects for you next week!

 

Friday mystery object #358

Another Friday, another mystery object. This week I’m going back to my favourite subject – skulls. This particular specimen has been brought in to the Dead Zoo for identification by customs and although I’ve narrowed it down, I’m still not 100% sure of the species just yet:

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It’s a fairly straightforward genus for anybody who knows their ungulates, so cryptic clues are appreciated. However, the species is harder to work out, so bonus points for detail. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #343 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery skull from the Ulster Museum to have a go at identifying:

If you’re a regular follower of Zygoma then you may have seen some of my previous posts talking about the skulls of the various smallish carnivores like mongooses, mustelids and viverrids. Generally though, mongooses have a more domed region above the eyes, while mustelids have a shorter snout, so this is most likely one of the viverrids.

It’s a difficult one to get down to species, since it’s from a group of carnivores that have have a fairly uniform skull shape, so it takes some detailed investigation to work out exactly what we’re dealing with. However, as I have talked about before (and as palfreyman1414 remembered), there’s a very helpful identification guide developed by some French researchers which summarises some of the most useful characters to use in identification.

Most useful to my mind is the matrix of characters that allows you to narrow down the possibilities until you’re left with the most likely species (watch out, the security certificate has expired). Once you’re down to a few possibilities based on those specific characters it can help to check the specimen images on the Animal Diversity Web which lets you get a better idea of overall shape and things like tooth form.

As it turns out, my 270th mystery object also provided a useful image for comparison:

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The reduced upper second molar (or M2) and the shape of the M1 in this specimen from the Grant Museum of Zoology is remarkably similar to the Ulster Museum specimen and it turns out it’s also from a species that made it to my shortlist using the matrix. So I’m fairly sure that this is an Abyssinian Genet Genetta abyssinica (Rüppell, 1836).

To give you an idea of what they look like, here’s a Common Genet in Wrocław Zoo by Guérin Nicolas, 2008

Well done to everyone who worked out we were dealing with a genet, but particular props to palfreyman1414 who was spot on when he said:

I’m wondering if, … this is related to the Abyssinian thingy you spent hours checking on from a complicated table of characteristics across 27 species…

Well remembered palfreyman1414, well remembered…

Friday mystery object #343

Last week I had the good fortune to visit the collections of the Ulster Museum in Belfast with the National Museums Northern Ireland’s Curator of Vertebrates Angela Ross. It’s always a valuable experience seeing other museum stores and it was a real pleasure to meet Angela and talk about our shared experiences with collections. 

As you might expect, as with every museum in the world, there are one or two specimens that have lost labels or that have never been identified, so I was fortunate enough to be get some photos of one such example for today’s mystery object. Any idea what this skull was from?

It has similarities to specimens I’ve featured in the past, and in the answers to those I’ve provided links to identification resources. If you have a rough idea of what this is, it may be worth your while using the search box in the top right corner of the blog to look for more information to help you narrow it down.

Have fun hunting for an identification – I know I will!

Friday mystery object #338 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery object to have a go at identifying:

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I thought it would prove tricky and I wasn’t wrong. For starters, it’s not a great photo – you can’t see many of the more distinctive features that might provide a clue, like the face with the nose shape. This wasn’t because I was trying to hide anything, it was simply because things have been very busy recently and I took this photo in a hurry as a record of a new specimen, rather than as an image for the Friday mystery object.

However, there are some clues available. First of all, the wing claw is on a short digit, unlike the long finger that you see in the fruitbats – plus it doesn’t have the big eyes that the fruitbats have so this is one of the microbats. Next, the scale shows that this animal would have a body length around 10cm – which is pretty big for one of the microbats.

Then you don’t have a big visible nose structure, which considering the angle of the photo doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but if it has one it’s not very prominent. In fact, there may be something a bit misleading in that area – a shiny black bump in the nose area that almost looks like a fake nose has been stuck on. This in fact is a bit if a clue as to the identify of this bat.

It’s actually a waxy secretion from just behind the nose that the males of this species produce as a signal to females and, I can attest, it’s quite pungent smelling. This combined with the colour of the fur suggests that this is a Diadem Round-leaf Bat Hipposideros diadema (É. Geoffroy, 1813).

20180913_170608-01.jpegThis is a very widespread species with a range from South East Asia to the top of Australia. Because they’re quite large and heavy they’re not very manoeuvrable, so they ambush their prey of large moths and beetles from a perch, launching themselves at anything their sonar picks up as it flies by. In fact these bats are big enough to take small birds and those large canines combined with having a very high bite force mean the Diadem Round-leaf Bat is able to handle these bigger prey and for researchers it’s reported to have a very painful bite.

This particular specimen was presented to the Museum by Customs, who seized it in the post because it lacked the appropriate import paperwork. I’m now in a bit of a quandary about what to do with the waxy secretion on the head. It has gummed down the leaf on the nose and it smells pretty strongly, so it make the specimen less useful for display, but it is still an interesting feature of the biology. It may a case of removing a sample and keeping it in a small tube with the specimen and then cleaning the rest off, so the full beauty of this bat’s face can be revealed.

 

Friday mystery object #331 answer

Last week I gave you these skulls from the collections of the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

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The reason for picking these was because I had an enquiry challenging the label associated with a specimen that was on display, and on checking there had clearly been some kind of mix-up, because the first mystery object had been identified as a False Killer Whale Pseudorca crassidens Owen, 1846 – which was definitely wrong.

The second mystery specimen is in fact the False Killer Whale (an identification that palfreyman1414 got right, supported by Rémi), whose label had been mixed up. That left the first mystery object still to be solved. Obviously it’s a toothed whale of some sort and the scale suggests it’s not a porpoise (a bit big) and it’s clearly too small to be one of the bigger dolphins (like a Killer Whale or Pilot Whale).

Generally it takes a bit of time looking at dolphin skulls from a few angles before you can start to get your eye in for identification – they just look so weird compared to the skulls of other mammals. They can also photograph quite poorly due to the large size – by which I mean that the height, length and breadth of a specimen can be distorted considerably in an image depending on small changes in the angle it sits at and the distance between the camera and the specimen.

However, the things I always try to look out for are the shape of the rostrum (or snout), the slope of the forehead, the patterns made by sutures between the bones around the nares (nostrils) and sutures between the bones in the ‘cheek’ area.

In this case there’s a very steep forehead, with a small bump midway, an upward deflection of the posterior maxillary margin (it looks like it’s got a bit of a smirk) and the sutures around the nares and the general shape of the nares all adds up to make me think that this is a White-beaked Dolphin Lagenorhynchus albirostris (Gray, 1846).

Imagine how pleased I was when I discovered that there was a label with that name on it, hiding in a different case and missing a specimen!

Friday mystery object #331

This week I have couple of specimens for you to have a go at identifying:

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I think these have been mislabelled and need their identifications checked to see if it’s a simple label swap or if it’s a deeper problem with the documentation. I won’t make it easier by providing the labels I’m suspect about – let’s see what you think working just from these images…

Have fun!

Friday mystery object #327 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery bone to identify:

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As I suspected, it was simultaneously easy and difficult: easy because it’s clearly an os penis or baculum; difficult because it can be hard to narrow down the species to which a baculum belongs without having specimens for comparison. For some reason people can be funny about penis bones and, despite the fact that male animals tend to be over-represented in museums, the baculum will often have been removed or not included in skeletal mounts.

That said, Steph came closest, getting the right family with the clue:

Bac to the bear-minimum I would guess?

If you remember one of my past posts I showed an image of the baculum mounted on the skeleton of a Giant Panda in Berlin (more about this below):

Panda_penis_bone

You can see that, although it differs slightly with a bit of a dip towards the tip, it’s rather similar in structure to the mystery object.

Oddly however, it appears that this baculum on the Berlin Panda specimen has been switched for that of a different bear species. Pandas have a very distinctive reduced baculum with wings (see below), that looks nothing like this, which is more similar to the os penis of a Spectacled Bear (or possibly a Polar Bear at a push).

The mystery object is actually the baculum of a Sloth Bear Melursus ursinus (Shaw, 1791).

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N.B. note that the writer of this label couldn’t quite bring themselves to write the full word “penis”

In future, should you ever find yourself with an unidentified bear penis on your hands, I suggest taking a look at this handy figure by Abella et al. 2013¹:

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Baculum in laterial view of: A Helarctos malayanus; B Ursus thibetanus; C Tremarctos ornatus; D Ursus americanus; E Melursus ursinus; F Ursus arctos; G Ursus maritimus; H Indarctos arctoides; I Ventral view of the Baculum of Ailuropoda melanoleuca; J Dorsal view of the baculum of Ailuropoda melanoleuca.

So in answering one mystery object we’ve uncovered a far bigger mystery – how did the Berlin Panda end up with the wrong penis?

 

¹Abella J, Valenciano A, Pérez-Ramos A, Montoya P, Morales J (2013) On the Socio-Sexual Behaviour of the Extinct Ursid Indarctos arctoides: An Approach Based on Its Baculum Size and Morphology. PLoS ONE 8(9): e73711. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0073711

Friday mystery object #326 answer

Last week I gave you this dissected mandible to have a go at identifying:

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I thought it might be fun to get a poetic response and I wasn’t disappointed. There were some great efforts and I thoroughly enjoyed unpicking the clues from the verses people crafted in response. Of course, a poetic soul is only so much use in this game – you also need to work out what it is.

Bob Church was the first with a bardic response that was unambiguously on target for the identity of the mystery specimen:

Though the bone’s a disaster
There’s enough left to answer
What this rolly polly animal could be
It might sound a bit funny
But mix a turtle and bunny
And you’ll find the bowled over family

Of course, if you mix a turtle and a bunny you get something that looks like the artistic creation by John Tenniel in 1865 to illustrate Lewis Caroll’s Mock Turtle from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

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Gryphon and Mock Turtle with Alice, by John Tenniel in 1865

The animal in question is actually remarkably similar in appearance:

9-banded Armadillo by Ereenegee, 2011

9-banded Armadillo by Ereenegee, 2011

It’s the Nine-banded Armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus Linnaeus, 1758, a decidedly odd animal that lives in South, Central and southern parts of North America.

Most mammals have well differentiated teeth, so the homogeneity of these in shape (or homodont condition) suggested that you were dealing with something a bit unusual, with simple peg-like teeth, open roots and no enamel. That makes the mandible quite distinctive, even with some missing teeth.

The one slightly confusing thing about this half a jaw is that it appears to have tooth holes (or dental alveoli) for 10 teeth (as recognised by salliereynolds, who also got the identification right), but armadillos are only meant to have eight teeth in each side of their upper and lower jaws.

I thought this difference might throw you off the Armadillo scent a bit, but clearly I was wrong. The difference in this jaw will probably be because it comes from a young animal which still has milk teeth (or the alveoli for them) that aren’t all replaced by the adult teeth.

These insectivorous armoured animals are unusual in a variety of ways beyond their dental idiosyncrasies. They have imbricated bony nodules or plates embedded in their skin (or osteoderms) that forms a tough armour:

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Dorsal view

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Ventral view (width ~5cm)

They also consistently give birth to four offspring every time, originating from a single egg that splits into four. So every Nine-banded Armadillo has three identical siblings. I think this fact alone qualifies them as one of the weirder animals out there.

More mysteries next week!

 

*Juliette Kings may have got in with the first identification, with reference to the Armadillo’s habit of jumping straight up in the air when alarmed and occasionally screaming, but it sounded a bit more like she was suggesting Goat.

Friday mystery object #323 answer

Last week I gave you this incredibly cute mystery floofball to identify:

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It took approximately 10 minutes for palfreyman1414 to work out what it was and come up with an excellent cryptic clue as to the identity of the genus:

Right, best guess is that this is a genus of tiny anno domini public transportation.

Tiny (=micro) anno domini (=AD aka Christian/Common Era, abbreviated to CE) public transportation (=bus) which gives us Microcebus.

Microcebus É. Geoffroy, 1834 are commonly known as the Mouse Lemurs, a genus containing 24 currently recognised species of tiny Malagasy primates.

Lesser Mouse Lemur by Arjan Haverkamp, 2007

Lesser Mouse Lemur by Arjan Haverkamp, 2007

Normally I’d be looking for a species level identification, but that would be a real challenge, since the members of this diminutive genus are remarkably similar in appearance – especially if you only have a very faded 100+ year old specimen to work from.

In fact, before genetic analysis was available, only two species of Mouse Lemur were formally recognised, with another couple proposed but disputed. In the last 20 years there have been a further 20 new species recognised, meaning that despite the label on the Dead Zoo specimen saying it’s Microcebus murinus (Miller, 1777), it could well be something else – perhaps even a new species yet to be described.

I say that because even though researchers have been busy finding new species, they are mostly working in the field and several of the species being discovered are incredibly rare due to habitat loss in Madagsacar. When our specimen was collected it could easily have been from an area that was logged before researchers had a chance to do genetic work on the Mouse Lemurs present, so there may have been species there that were never discovered before they were lost.

This idea of species being lost before they’re discovered is a depressing, but very real one. Most taxonomists agree that there are around ten times as many species on Earth as have been described by science so far. More are being discovered all the time, but they tend to be from areas with fewer scientists (unsurprisingly), but not necessarily areas with less human impact.

Rainforests are a good example, where species diversity is incredibly high, but dams, logging and slash-and-burn agriculture to support soy, palm oil and cattle farming are gobbling up huge swathes of habitat before biologists have ever seen it.

To put that into some kind of perspective, England and Wales are much less diverse than a rainforest environment, but new species are still being found despite having a couple of centuries of extensive and systematic recording and collecting. The perspective comes from the fact that an area of rainforest the same size as England and Wales is destroyed every year, before it’s ever had a chance to be studied.

I talked about some of the issues of extinction on the Mooney Goes Wild radio programme recently, which you can listen to here if you’re interested.

More mysteries next week!

Friday mystery object #321 answer

Last week I gave you this fuzzy object from the stores of the Dead Zoo:

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It’s a slightly generic looking creature and I’m not surprised a few ideas for identification were mooted, because it lacks any single distinctive feature in this image (partly because the characteristic grizzled facial hair is a bit indistinguishable due to historic soot). That didn’t stop Wouter van Gestel, Mike Shanahan, RobinBirrrd, James Bryant, and jor from recognising it though.

This is the wonderfully weird Bearcat or Binturong Arctictis binturong Temminck, 1824 which is a South and Southeast Asian carnivore in the viverid family (those are the civets) that is one of only two carnivores with a prehensile tail (I’ve talked about the other one, the Kinkajou, in a previous blogpost).

Like the Kinkajou, the Binturong isn’t a very carnivorous carnivore. It eats more figs than meat and it lacks the restless dynamism of the average predator, plodding flat-footedly on the ground and climbing well, albeit in a much slower and more measured way than other arboreal carnivores that take killing a bit more seriously.

Binturong by Greg Hume, 2017

Binturong displaying characteristic levels of activity. Image by Greg Hume, 2017

Apart from the unusual prehensile tail, the living Binturong has one other unusual characteristic (as pointed out by RobinBirrrd) – it smells like popcorn. This is due to the emissions of its musk gland, situated conveniently near the genitals and anus. Sadly our specimen smells more like a half-washed dog that’s been rolling in mothballs.

More mysteries next week!