The Raccoon Family: Olingos

Northern olingo

While it's probably fair to say that the members of the raccoon family unique to Latin America are less well-known to those of us in the English-speaking world than are their northern counterparts, the olingos are likely the least well-known of all. Raccoons, coatis, and kinkajous were all scientifically described back in the 18th century - at least in general terms, if not all of the species recognised today. The cacomistle, while known to the Aztecs, didn't reach the scientific literature until 1830, but we have to wait another four decades before anyone European seems to have noticed the olingo.

This was William Gabb, who had been asked by the government of Costa Rica to conduct a three-year biological survey of the Talamanca region, on their eastern border with Panama. He completed the survey in 1876, but died two years later from malaria contracted while on the expedition. His real expertise was in dinosaur fossils so when he discovered a previously unknown species of living mammal, he sent the skull and pelt to Joel Asaph Allen at Harvard. Granted, he was an ornithologist (he would later help to set up the Audubon Society) but he did also have an interest in mammals, and was able to identify the animal as a new member of the raccoon family "as unlike [raccoons and coatis] as these... are unlike each other".

The Raccoon Family: Kinkajous - the primate-like "raccoons"

Raccoons proper are well-known animals, both familiar and distinctive even to those of us living in countries where they are not native. Among the other members of the raccoon family, coatis are at least familiar to people in the southern US. Ringtails ("cacomistles") are probably more obscure, being smaller and mostly active high up in trees at night, but at least, they too, live in the US. The remaining species, however, live only in Latin America and it's probably fair to say that they are much less familiar to English speakers than those groups with more northerly representatives.

Perhaps the most distinctive, and certainly the most studied, of these is a genus with just one species: the kinkajou (Potos flavus). It was first scientifically described by Johann Schreber in 1774, in an earlier volume of the book in which he would later describe (among other things) cheetahs, snow leopards, and bobcats. While he was understandably clear those were all cats, the identity of the kinkajou was not so obvious. In the days before Darwin, this may not have held any deep meaning for him, but his conclusion was that his new animal was a kind of lemur.

The Raccoon Family: Cacomistles

Ringtail

While true raccoons and coatis were first scientifically described during the 18th century, the third member of the raccoon family that's native to the United States was not described until 1830, by Heinrich Lichtenstein - who later went on to found the Berlin Zoo. It's unclear (at least to me) exactly what he thought the animal was. So far as I can translate the original German, his original description says that it's somewhere between a civet and a coati in appearance, but also looks quite like a fox. Based on which, he gave it the scientific name Bassaris astutus, a mixture of Greek and Latin that roughly translates as "cunning fox".

The scientific name didn't stand, because it turned out that the first part of it had already been used for a kind of butterfly. Furthermore, while he originally referred to the animal by its Spanish name "cacomixtle", since the specimen he knew of came from somewhere near Mexico City, in English we now call it a ringtail (Bassariscus astutus) or, less accurately, a "ring-tailed cat". Even so, in many parts of the US, an Anglicised form of the Spanish name is still in wide use. 

The Raccoon Family: Coatis

White-nosed coati

The common raccoon is the only member of the family whose scientific name dates back to the official dawn of biological taxonomy in 1758. However, people continued sending him new specimens to catalogue and, just eight years later, in a later edition of the same work, Linnaeus added two further species that we would now also place in the raccoon family - albeit, he initially described them as civets.

These two animals were coatis (or "coatimundis"), with one first identified from Mexico, and the other from Brazil. They were given their own genus by Gottlieb Storr in 1780 when he first named the raccoon family. It's probably fair to say that, to modern eyes, Storr's classification seems the more reasonable of the two; coatis look a lot more like raccoons than they do like civets.

The Raccoon Family: The True Raccoons

Common raccoon

While the raccoon family contains more species than most people likely realise, by far its best-known example is the animal for which it is named. The common raccoon (Procyon lotor), alternatively known as the "northern raccoon" or simply "the raccoon" was the first species in the family to be scientifically described, no doubt because it's not only common and widespread, but because it's a very distinctive animal. Everyone must surely be familiar with what they look like, and, if you're North American, there's a decent chance that's from first-hand experience.

The common raccoon is found across almost the whole of the contiguous United States, barring only some of the drier parts of the Great Basin, as well as across southern Canada and virtually all of Mexico and Central America. Furthermore, raccoons were introduced to Germany as a hunting animal in 1927 and, with the help of others that escaped from fur farms, since around the 1970s they have been expanding rapidly across Europe. Over the last couple of decades, they have established populations from Spain and France in the west across to Russia and Ukraine in the east. In the 1990s, they were also introduced to Japan and they have also been introduced to Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia, probably following escapes from fur farms.

The Raccoon Family

It has not always been easy to determine where exactly raccoons fit within the larger mammalian family tree. In part, this is because it's difficult to pin down exactly what defines them and makes them distinctive from their closest relatives. We can get some idea of this by looking at the taxonomic history of the group.

The scientific classification of living organisms we use today has its origins in the 1758 edition of Systema Naturae, by Carl Linnaeus. Raccoons live only in the Americas, but even in 1758, Linnaeus was aware of the existence of raccoons, having heard about them from his friend Peter Kalm, who had observed them in what were then the colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Based on Kalm's description, Linnaeus named this new species Ursus lotor - the "washing bear". It was one of four species of "bear" that he identified in that work, only one of which we'd still consider to be such today.