Skunks of the World: Spotted Skunks

Eastern spotted skunk

At least outside of the Americas, the most familiar species of skunk is the striped sort and, as I mentioned last time, even scientifically speaking, this is the animal that defines the skunk family. It's perhaps surprising then, to note that, despite it also being very widespread and highly visible, it wasn't the first species of skunk to be named.

That honour goes to the spotted skunk, which appeared in the earliest recognised list of scientific animal names in 1758. This isn't to say that nobody knew at the time what a striped skunk was, merely that the naturalists of the day had yet to identify them as something distinct from the spotted sort, and it was the latter that happened to be described first - the striped skunk followed less than twenty years later, in 1776. Before they were given their own genus, both species were originally placed in Viverra, which comes from the Latin word for "ferret" but seems to have been used for any small, slender mammalian carnivore that didn't fit elsewhere (not including, ironically, the ferrets). 

Skunks of the World: Striped and Hooded Skunks

Striped skunk

It's probably fair to say that when most people think of "skunks" the first animal to come to mind is a black, cat-sized creature with white stripes down its back and a bushy tail. That certainly seems to have been the case for Charles Bonaparte when he first erected the skunk family in 1845, since that is the animal he named it for. More accurately, the type species of the type genus for the family - in a sense, the defining species against which all other skunks are compared - is the striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis). The fact that it has that doubled ("tautonymous") name suggests that, back in 1795, when they named the genus itself, Geoffroy and Cuvier thought much the same thing.

It's hardly surprising; the striped skunk is the most widespread and common of all the species of skunk and surely the most familiar to most North Americans and hence, indirectly, to most Europeans. (For what it's worth, while all the naturalists named above were French, Bonaparte had at least spent a few years working in the US, and was probably much more familiar with skunks than his predecessors). Indeed, the striped skunk lives across the whole of the contiguous US, save only the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin of southern Nevada. It's also found across most of southern and central Canada, and, being no respecter of the US Immigration Service, also into northern Mexico.