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| Saharan striped polecat |
Even before we had good molecular and genetic evidence for how the various members of the weasel family were related to each other, there were a number of different schemes proposed for dividing up the family into smaller groups. Otters were almost universally agreed to be something different from the other weasels, and, in the simplest scheme, everything that wasn't an otter was considered a "musteline". Once the genetic information arrived, it wasn't a terribly great surprise to learn that the martens were a group, the 'true' badgers were a group, and so on. Removing badgers, martens, and the like, meant that the term 'musteline' now referred only to the weasels themselves, and their closest relatives: stoats, polecats, and mink.
What was rather more surprising though, was that one group of what seemed to be quite clearly weasel-like animals actually constituted an entirely separate branch of the family tree. Mostly living in the southern hemisphere, it had not really been obvious before that these animals were especially closely related to one another. Because of that, unlike badgers, otters, and martens, they had no collective name in English. The scientific term for members of this group is "galictines", and that remains the best word we have for them.
