A History of the Honey Badger

Traditionally the weasel family was divided into three subfamilies: the otters, the skunks, and everything else. Sometimes the badgers were added as a fourth subfamily, but that was about it. As more modern genetic analysis came along, showing us some of the underlying relationships that weren't apparent from anatomy alone, it became clear that things were a good deal more complicated than that, and we now recognise about eight subfamilies of mustelid. (And that's not counting the skunks, which turned out to belong to a different group).

The badgers, in particular, turned out to be more varied in their origins than we had previously thought. Their superficial similarities were due to them all having evolved to be heavily-built digging animals, rather than because they all shared one single ancestor. In particular, two kinds of badger, the American and honey badgers, are now recognised as representing their own distinct subfamilies, with just one living species each, and diverging from the other "weasels" very early on - probably before the "true" badgers of Eurasia had first appeared.

Miocene (Pt 8): Giant Honey Badgers and European Pandas

Indarctos

A great many predators lived in Europe in the glorious warmth of the Mid Miocene, when the continent was lush with subtropical vegetation and the herbivores that fed on it. As the climate began to turn, and the forests gave way to more open terrain, both the herbivores and the animals that preyed on them underwent a number of changes, with the latter in particular suffering some loss of diversity. (At least, so far as we can tell from the incomplete fossil record).

This affected the full gamut of mammalian carnivores, including many of the smaller, less obvious, ones. The boundary between the Middle and Late Miocene is an arbitrary one that isn't really marked by anything much in Europe, so that, to begin with, these were as numerous as ever. There were badgers, such as Sabadellictis, and even skunks, which today are not found outside the Americas.

Teeth of the Giant Honey Badger

Skeleton of a modern honey badger

Honey badgers (Mellivora capensis) have something of a reputation as particularly fierce animals. As is often the case, the reputation is somewhat exaggerated, but it isn't entirely false, either, and they are rather more purely carnivorous than the European badgers of Hufflepuff fame. They are, of course, members of the weasel family, on which I have posted at some length before, and, these days, are usually considered distinct enough to warrant their own subfamily within that group.

According to one study of the evolutionary relationships between mustelids, honey badgers represent one of the earliest branches of the weasel family tree. Assuming a relatively constant rate of genetic change between species after they diverge, and calibrating with the ages of some known fossils, the same study estimated that they should have first appeared about 11 million years ago, during the mid Miocene epoch, and probably in Asia. Naturally, for most of that time, they would not have been the same species that they are today, something that likely arrived much later - it's just that none of their closer relatives survived until the present day.

Weasels Digging Holes: American and Honey Badgers

American badger

It was thought at one time that the various species of badger were fairly close relatives within the weasel family. More recent genetic evidence has shown us that that's not the case, and that there is more to their story than one might guess from simply looking at them. While the majority of badgers do indeed belong to a single, related, group - what we might call the "true" badgers - there are some exceptions.

In fact, the badger body plan and lifestyle appear to have evolved at least three times within the weasel family. One instance led to the "true" badgers, with at least four species, and possibly more not yet formally recognised. The other two are no more closely related to the "true" badgers, or even each other, than they are to, say, otters or stoats. In each case, only one member of the lineage survives today, giving us two "subfamilies" with just one living species each.

Of the two, the better known is surely the American badger (Taxidea taxus). Despite being as genetically distant from the European badger as its possible to be without belonging to an entirely different family, it's really not hard to see why early American colonists chose to give it the same name as the animal they were already familiar with. In addition to the short limbs typical of all members of the weasel family, it has a compact, muscular body, wedge-shaped head, and powerful digging claws. That's not really so surprising, when you consider that there are only so many ways to modify the body of a weasel to make it into an effective digger.