Euplerids: Falanoucs and Fanalokas

Fanaloka

The relationships of the native Madagascan carnivores were uncertain before the advent of genetic testing at the end of the 20th century. The majority were assumed to be mongooses, since that is very much what they looked like, but three species didn't quite fit the pattern. 

Two of these were, so far as anyone could tell from their physical appearance and habits, civets. They were often placed in their own subfamily, reflecting their distance from other civets, but nonetheless, they were thought to belong among the viverrids. Following genetic studies in 2003, however, it became clear that they belonged in the same group as (i.e. shared a unique common ancestor with) the Madagascan "mongooses". Since some of them clearly weren't mongooses, and since they had diverged from the real ones so long ago, the subfamily was split off and promoted to full family level, now including both the mongoose-like and civet-like species.

Eocene (Pt 4): Ancient Beasts of the European Archipelago

Propalaeotherium

The story of the evolution of the horse is one of the most commonly cited examples of evolutionary trends, often illustrated by a series of increasingly horse-like animals with an ever-reducing number of toes. The animal typically shown at the start of that series is, depending partly on the age of the picture, either Hyracotherium or Eohippus.

Hyracotherium was long regarded as the earliest known member of the horse family. In recent decades, it has become apparent that it wasn't really a horse, in the sense that modern horses don't descend from it or its relatives, and today we call the family it belonged to the palaeotheres. The North American Eohippus, on the other hand, despite long being thought to be identical to Hyracotherium, probably is a horse. The confusion between the two means that it's often difficult to tell which is being referred to in older sources. 

Looking for Leaves: the Travel Routines of a Koala

Animals inevitably have a preference for the particular habitat in which they live. Factors such as climate and the presence of suitable hiding and sleeping places are important, along with the presence of suitable food. While climate is less of a problem, food and shelter may be patchily distributed, with insufficient food in any one place to support the animal for long. The animal may also wish to avoid sheltering in any one place for too long, less predators find it easy to locate, and it also makes sense to travel between different patches of land if you want to find mates.

Thus, it can be important to know not merely which habitats a particular species of animal prefers, but how it moves about within that habitat to use to its best advantage. Does it tend to revisit particular patches of ground, and if so, how often? A herbivore, after all, wouldn't want to head back to a given place before whatever it had eaten there had had a chance to regrow.

Euplerids: The Not-Mongooses of Madagascar

Ring-tailed vontsira

There are around 35 currently recognised species of mongoose, spread between Asia and continental Africa. For the most part, they look fairly similar, with most being instantly identifiable as such. For most of the 20th century, however, they were also thought to live on Madagascar. In the last couple of decades, genetic studies have revealed that the Madgascan species, while related to the mongoose family proper, belong in a group of their own. That's partly because they diverged so far back in time, but also because that group includes some animals that manifestly aren't mongooses.

Today, in order to distinguish what we used to call "Madagascan mongooses" from the real sort, we tend to use the local Malagasy word and describe them as "vontsiras".

Not Leaving Home: Wolves on the Serengeti

There is a popular belief that wolf packs are led by an "alpha male", a dominant individual who directs the pack and monopolises breeding opportunities through the force of his masculine aggression. It's all-but universal in modern stories about werewolves, and has even crept into the messaging of online influencers, apparently following the reasoning that anything true of wolves must necessarily also be true of humans.

It is, however, simply not true.

Having said which, it used to be a serious scientific theory, derived from behavioural studies on captive wolves conducted in the mid 20th century. Better studies at the end of the century, looking at wolves in their natural habitats and not stressed by close confinement with non-family members in zoo cages, revealed the truth: not only is the dominant female at least as important as the male, but the correct word for that dominant pair isn't "alpha", it's "parents".

A Brief History of Zokors

The rodents are the largest group of mammals, in terms of number of species, and they are divided into several families. Some of these are familiar, such as the mice, voles, squirrels, and gophers, but others are much less so, at least to the majority of people in the West. This includes, for example, the zokors.

There are a couple of reasons why zokors are not as well-known as some other rodent groups. For one thing, they only live in northeast Asia, an area that it's fair to say doesn't receive much attention in the Western world. For another, even if you did live there, you wouldn't see them very often, because they are burrowing animals that don't like coming to the surface if they can help it. Rather like moles, you might see the mounds of earth they leave, but not often the animal itself.

Strange Carnivores of Madagascar

Madagascar is the fourth-largest island in the world, almost three times the size of Great Britain, or half again the size of California. We should not be surprised, therefore, that it has a considerable amount of native wildlife. However, it's also noteworthy that it has been an island for a very long time - certainly for far longer than Britain has been.

In fact, Madagascar became an island around 91 million years ago, over 20 million years before even the likes of Tyrannosaurus appeared on the scene. Moreover, this was when it split away from what was then the island of India, with its break from Africa being almost twice as far back in time. But, even if we take that younger date for the beginning of its isolation from any sort of 'mainland', it's well before any of the sort of mammals we would recognise today had evolved. There's no equivalent here of mammoths nipping across the English Channel.