Philippine Flying Lemur (Colugo) (Cynocephalus volans)

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Here's another order checked off the list. I think this is a goal we'll reach, mammals! And what a mammal this one is. Have you ever heard of flying lemurs, also called colugos? There are two species, one that lives in the Philippines and one that lives in Thailand, Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the like. Both species have this amazing membrane that stretches from their neck…to the tips of their fingers…to the tips of their toes…to the tip of their tail. Compare that to the flying squirrel, who has skin for gliding just between, basically, its wrists and ankles. It's amazing, this colugo membrane.

Colugos flip their tail up, sort of inside out, when they're on the go so it doesn't get "soiled," according to Walker's Mammals of the World, or caught on a branch. They're truly arboreal, and they freak out if they somehow end up on the ground. They can climb in "a series of lurches" and they shuttle along horizontal branches hanging the way sloths do. But their most impressive mode of locomotion is their gliding. In a single glide, they can travel upwards of 100 meters (109 yards)!

These guys eat almost nothing but greenery. Walker's also says that "the gliding membrane of the mother can be folded into a soft, warm pouch to hold the young," and "the mother may leave the young in a nest tree or carry it with her while foraging," as you see this lady colugo doing. And colugos are crepuscular, a lovely word meaning "active at twilight." I wonder if there's an equivalent word that means "active at dawn."

Finally, please click to enlarge this photograph of a colugo in flight, which is from Pennsylvania State University. It's so amazing!

The Daily Telegraph: 'Your cousin, the 'flying lemur'"

Consecutive days of mammals: 16
Previous record: 11

New Feature: Mammal News Roundup

Sometimes I see articles online or in magazines that I think would interest Daily Mammal readers. When they concern mammals I haven't drawn yet, I can feature them as Daily Mammal Now posts. But when I've already drawn them, or just don't want to or can't draw them right away for some reason, I don't have a good vehicle to share them with you.

That's why I'm going to start occasionally (weekly? fortnightly? semiweekly? who knows?) pointing you to some very recent news stories and articles that you might want to read, or at least know about. Here's the first Mammal News Roundup.

Daily Mail, May 12, 2008: There's a cow the size of an elephant. He was left on the doorstop of an English animal sanctuary when he was an infant. The first picture makes him look especially large; check it out. Note to Americans: swede is what Brits call rutabaga.

Science Daily, May 13, 2008: Double mammal newsflash: In Brazil, they're training dogs to recognize the scent of various endangered mammals (like the jaguar and the giant anteater), helping researchers monitor their populations.

Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times, May 13, 2008: They're still trying to figure out what's causing white-nose syndrome, the strange ailment that's devastating some populations of bats in the northeastern United States. (Click on the Daily Mammal Now link above for more.)

U.S. Department of the Interior news release, May 14, 2008: Polar bears are now listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Since climate change is a major cause of polar bears' decline, but it's very difficult, to say the least, to prove how any particular action by Americans influences the climate change that's harming the bears, it is unclear how much the move will help the bears.

When I drew the polar bear, I found in my research that some people think that the polar bear is actually the same species as the brown bear. I looked into that a little more today and learned some interesting things. It seems polar bears, which are recognized as a distinct species by most anyone without an ax to grind, evolved from the brown bear pretty recently, some 200,000 years ago. And they were still developing adaptations as recently as 40,000 years ago.

I wonder how you would decide when the species was still the brown bear and when it had become the polar bear. Maybe there's a bare minimum of changes and differences that must be present? Or a certain number of DNA markers that should be present or absent? Or is it a case of "you know it when you see it"?

Some people, evidently regarded as nuts by some other people, think that melting ice in the Arctic will force the polar bear to evolve back into the brown bear, but it seems pretty likely to me that they're endangered enough that we can't expect them to be around long enough for that to happen with no intervention. Being an amateur biologist, though, I can just speculate.

BBC News, December 10, 2007: An Icelandic (yay!) scientist found the most ancient polar bear jawbone we have, a 150,000-year-old specimen. The article discusses, in brief, the evolutionary history of the polar bear.

(Polar bear photograph by Scott Schliebe, USFWS)

Aardvark (Orycteropus afer)

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Here's another order (Tubulidentata) that now contains only one family, one genus, and one species! Aardvarks live pretty much anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa that they can find ants and termites. They hunt the insects by smell, snuffling along the ground with their tongues sticking out. They're nocturnal and solitary and live in underground burrows. In fact, if you're an aardvark's enemy and you're going after it, it probably will escape you not by running away, but by digging a hole real quick.

In Afrikaans, the word aardvark means "earth pig." It seems aardvarks are very strong. Here's an evocative anecdote from Walker's Mammals of the World:

It is an extremely powerful animal. In one case, a man with a firm grip on the tail of an aardvark in its den was slowly drawn into the burrow as far as his waist and finally had to relinquish his hold, despite the additional leverage afforded by two other persons.

And how about this:

Its eyesight does not appear to be good, since the aardvark frequently crashes into bushes, tree trunks, and other obstructions when running.

Bless their hearts!

Consecutive days of mammals: 15
Previous record: 11

Monito del Monte (Dromiciops australis)

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One of my goals as the first year of the Daily Mammal comes to a close was to have drawn every order of mammals by June 3. If my calculations are correct, that's 10 orders (out of 28 or so, depending on who's counting; we've been leaning heavily on the carnivora, primates, and rodentia orders, I think). This one, Microbiotheria, caught my eye because in that order there's only one family…one genus…and one species. This guy, the monito del monte (little mountain monkey), is the last of his kind.

Weighing in at about as much as a dollar in quarters, the monito del monte (let's call him MDM, shall we?) makes his home in part of Chile and a sliver of Argentina. MDMs are marsupials, and in looking for pictures of them, I found notices of a recent scientific discovery. You see, in Australia, they've found the 55-million-year-old fossilized remains of a creature called the djarthia, which is Australia's oldest known marsupial and likely the ancestor of all of the marsupials living in Australia today.

What does that have to do with the MDM? Well, while scientists had long suspected that the MDM was closer kin to the Australian marsupials than to the few living in the Americas, finding these fossils proved it. (This has implications for theories about where and when marsupials evolved and from where and to where they migrated; some scientists believe that marsupials evolved in South America and went to Australia via Antarctica when the three continents were part of Gondwana, and this would indicate that the MDM went back to South America at some point before the continents split up, then got stranded there, basically.)

Anyway, I won't get into the whole train of investigation that set me on tonight (phylogenetics, cladistics, systematics…). It may be enough to know that the tiny monito del monte is cute, that it's "secretive," according to Science Daily, and that, in the colder parts of its range where it hibernates in the winter, it stores up enough fat in the base of its tail to double its weight in a week. Some Chilean Indians call it the colocolo. Finally, here's a new (to me, and maybe to you) word: scansorial, meaning "adapted to or specialized for climbing." In a sentence: "Some people think the monito del monte is arboreal, but since it doesn't really spend all its time in the treetops, it's probably more accurate to call it scansorial."

Science Daily: "Primitive Mouse-like Creature May Be Ancestral Mother of Australia's Unusual Pouched Mammals"

Two weeks straight of mammals! I have a full weekend and a business trip on Monday, so this streak will likely end soon—let's celebrate it while we can!

Consecutive days of mammals: 14
Previous record: 11

Long-eared Desert Hedgehog (Hemiechinus auritus)

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This prickly—but not too prickly, all things considered—little fellow is a member of one of two species of long-eared desert hedgehogs. This one lives in the steppes of Ukraine and Mongolia and Libya, Pakistan, and Cyprus, and the similar terrain between those areas. In some places, these hedgehogs hang out in people's gardens and backyards—another interesting example of everyday urban wildlife that seems exotic if you're from somewhere else.

Categorized as insectivores, long-eared desert hedgehogs eat not only insects, but other invertebrates, some small vertebrates, eggs, fruit, seeds, and carrion. I can just see a hedgehog smorgasbord laid out for their enjoyment, can't you?

Consecutive days of mammals: 13
Previous record: 11

Mammalthon 2: Guereza (Colobus guereza)

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Last one! That was sure a looooong 24 hours, wasn't it? My tía Laura let me pick for her, and I selected this black-and-white colobus monkey species, the guereza. It lives in Africa, and the white feathery fur you see off its shoulder here is called its mantle. It also has a very long tail, not shown here. This guy reminds me of a certain famous painting, and painter. Check it out:



Consecutive days of mammals: 12
Previous record: 11

Mammalthon 2: White-Nosed Coati (Nasua narica)

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My dad asked me to draw him a coatimundi. It turns out that the coatimundi, once thought to be a separate species, is actually a male coati. Coatimundi, in a Central American Indian language I can't pin down for certain, means "lone coati" or "solitary coati," and adult male coatis are a lonesome bunch, roaming about alone while the females form groups.

There are two species of coati. This one lives in Central America up to Arizona and New Mexico. In parts of its range, it's called the pizote. One of the coolest things about coatis is that they can move the tips of their noses around. Do an image search and you'll see what I mean.

One mammal left in Mammalthon 2! If you ordered a drawing: We sent out about half of them today. If you are related to me and live in town, I will give you yours in person. Otherwise, start checking your mail later this week or early next week!

Consecutive days of mammals: 11
Previous record: 11