Skunks of the World: Stink Badgers!

Sunda stink badger

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, for most of the 20th century, skunks were thought to be mustelids, members of the same animal family as weasels, polecats, badgers, and the like. They were given their own family in the 1990s, once it became clear that racoons were more closely related to mustelids than they were. But the genetic analyses that revealed this fact also provided another surprise.

It had been assumed that skunks (as a subfamily of mustelids) lived only in the Americas, much as racoons do. But the genetic studies showed that two species of supposed badger living in Indonesia were not, in fact, badgers at all, but members of the newly erected skunk family. These animals are collectively known as "stink badgers", although the local name of "teludu" and "pantot" are sometimes preferred.

Skunks of the World: Hog-nosed Skunks

American hog-nosed skunk

There are, perhaps surprisingly, at least five different species of skunk living in the US. In fairness, two of them - the spotted skunks - are so similar to one another that it took genetic tests in the 1990s to prove they were more than subspecies, while the striped and hooded skunks are at least superficially similar as well. The fifth one is the American hog-nosed skunk (Conepatus leuconotus) and it's neither striped nor spotted.

If it's less familiar than the others, even to many Americans, that may be because it's only found in the southwest. It is common across Mexico, and also lives across Central America as far south as northern Nicaragua, but in the US it's restricted to Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Even here, it doesn't inhabit the whole region, being found in only certain parts of those states and avoiding, for example, both the harsher deserts and dense woodland. Although it does live in some tropical habitats at the far southern end of its range, its preference is instead for grassland and mesquite scrub, often with plenty of acacia thorn bushes. 

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. 

The Stinky Family: Skunks

Unlike raccoons, there was relatively little confusion on the part of early zoologists as to what general sort of animal the skunks were. Since the animals are not native to Europe, the first Europeans knew of them was when they reached the Americas. The closest analogy they could think of among familiar animals was a polecat, and in some parts of America, they are still referred to as such today. However, an indigenous name for the animal (probably Algonquian) won out in English, and "skunks" they became.

Skunks did make it on to the first recognised list of scientific animal names in 1758, as Viverra putorius - the latter half of which, again, means "polecat". The first half indicates that Linnaeus, probably having only a minimal description to go on at the time, considered them to belong with the civets and mongooses, as a sort of generic small, bitey, mammal. That did not last; in 1795, an encyclopedia jointly published by  Cuvier and Geoffroy gave them their own genus. The name for this, Mephitis, comes from a goddess of noxious underground gases worshipped in pre-Roman and Roman Italy - the sort of thing that only tribes living near a volcano are likely to come up with.