Fossil Martens... or Not?

When talking about fossil animals on this blog I often mention the earliest known example of a particular group. But this often hides a degree of uncertainty, or even controversy, because such the exact identity of such fossils can be difficult to pinpoint. That's partly because, being, by definition, older than other fossil examples of the group, they are also the most likely to be incomplete or poorly preserved. Often, since we're talking about mammals here, the "oldest known fossil" may consist of little more than a distinctive tooth. 

The second, and perhaps even bigger, problem is that the further you go back to the origin of a group the more it blurs into whatever preceded it. Even if we had perfect remains, or if we could travel back in time and see the animals in life, or take blood samples from them for genetic analysis, there would always be a question of what exactly we were looking at. Where do you draw the line when, in reality, one group will have slowly and perhaps imperceptibly, evolved into a newer one?

The Dog Family: Canidae

A wolf

The dog family does not have the same variety of different forms and species as does the weasel family. I also suspect that, with the exception of grey wolves, it doesn't get the sort of attention that the big cats do. Yet, of course, even apart from the wolves and their domestic descendants, it includes a number of familiar species, as well as some that are rather more exotic. So, with goats and marmosets out of the way, let's turn to the taxonomic family of man's best friend.

With, perhaps, one or two exceptions, most members of the dog family are instantly recognisable as such. Ignoring the domestic breeds, they typically have muscular bodies, long legs, large, mobile, ears, heads that are broadly triangular in shape, and bushy tails.

Their legs are the shape they are because they're adapted to chasing prey, and most dogs are therefore pretty good at running. They have four toes on each of the hind feet, and, while most of them do have the full set of five on the front feet, the thumb (or "dewclaw") doesn't reach the ground. Their snout is the length and shape it is, partly to get in a large and sensitive nose, and partly to fit in an array of teeth that don't restrict them purely to eating meat.

The World of Weasels

The common, European, weasel, Mustela nivalis

The best known of the carnivorous mammals are surely the large, dramatic, species, such as lions, tigers, wolves, and grizzly bears. Yet, if we determine evolutionary success by the number of species in a group, the most successful carnivoran family is not that of the cats, dogs, bears, or hyenas, but the weasel family. In a way, this should not surprise us too much, since there is always going to more food going around for a small animal than for something the size of a tiger or polar bear.

The weasel family is also, arguably, the most diverse of the carnivoran families. Nobody would doubt that a tiger is a kind of cat, and its hardly surprising to learn that foxes are members of the dog family, but the majority of members of the weasel family are not animals that, in everyday speech, we would call weasels. True, ferrets, for example, do look rather like out-sized weasels, but its probably less obvious that the family includes such animals as badgers, otters, and wolverines.

But what, exactly is a family of animals? The latest edition of Mammal Species of the World lists 144 families of mammal, 121 of which are placentals, but such a list can never be truly definitive. The modern rules for defining any natural group of animals, whether it be a family, subfamily, order, or anything else, is that all the species in that group must be more closely related to each other than to anything outside the group. This means that a family, like any other meaningful group of species, includes a single common ancestor and all of its living descendants.