Newly Described Mammals Week: John Cleese's Woolly Lemur (Avahi cleesei)

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On Oscars night, here's a special lemur named for an Oscar nominee! Discovered by scientists (although, actually, one of the scientists gives credit to their local guide) in 1990, this little woolly lemur was named in honor of actor/writer/director/man's man/ladies' man/man-about-town John Cleese 15 years later.

Lemurs, which are primates, are unique to Madagascar (maybe not quite unique—apparently there's another island to which they were introduced, as well, but really, just Madagascar). Woolly lemurs, of which Cleese's is one, are very small. This one only weighs about two pounds. Lemurs are excellent at leaping from tree to tree, and some of them race around on their back legs. The nature reserve where Cleese's lemur lives is also home to 11 other lemur species. (I really want to go to Madagascar.)

Why John Cleese? you may ask. Check out his website, and you'll see from the first page how passionate he is about lemurs. In fact, he made a documentary about them, and his follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, Fierce Creatures, apparently presented a conservation viewpoint. I imagine the scientists named this lemur after Cleese because scientific types probably like the John Cleese humor, plus naming it after a celebrity would attract publicity and attention to the cause of conserving Malagasy biodiversity. (Yes, I just wanted to use the word Malagasy.) I think it's a great name. What do you think?

You really should read this PDF of an article by Urs Thalmann, one of the scientists who described this lemur. It's short, written for a general audience, full of pictures, and an account of dysentery, political unrest, malaria, bandits, and, sadly, two deaths.

This lemur is for Ted, a big fan of Basil Fawlty!

Newly Described Mammals Week: Laotian Rock Rat (Laonastes aenigmamus)

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"The coelacanth of rodents," this Laotian rat is a member of a family scientists thought had been extinct for 11 million years. So those scientists must have been surprised when they found some for sale in a food market in 1996!

Actually scientists initially thought the rat was a member of a brand-new family and described it as such. Other scientists who excitedly read the 2005 paper that described the new family recognized its resemblance to the Diatomys fossils they studied, and released their own paper in 2006 making the claim that the Laotian rock rat is actually what's called a "Lazarus" mammal. (Like yesterday, I don't have the fortitude to decipher the scientific articles to figure out whether this claim still stands or not.) There is only one other mammal species known to have that long a gap in its fossil history.

The 1996 specimens were joined by more dead Laotian rock rats in 1998, but it wasn't until 2006 that scientists saw a living one. You can see a photo here on the National Geographic site.

Newly Described Mammals Week: Alpine Long-Eared Bat (Plecotus alpinus)

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Here's another one that was discovered to be a species through DNA, at least I think that's what happened. I'm sorry to say that I'm a little too bushed to figure it all out right now. I'll leave that to you, if you care to download the PDF of the 2002 article that described this little guy for the first time. Plecotus alpinus, my friend, I am sorry that your roll of the 5,000-sided die came up this month, when I cannot give you the time I ordinarily (I hope) would be able to, but it had to happen to someone.

Here is a fact I learned while researching Mr. Alpine Long-Eared Bat, though. See the long, sort of triangular-shaped things on the front of his ears? Those are called tragi (singular tragus). The word comes from the Greek tragos, or goat, which my dictionary explains thusly: "with reference to the characteristic tuft of hair that is often present, likened to a goat's beard." I think it's likely that the triangular-shaped things we have in front of our ears are also tragi, although neither we nor the Alpine long-eared bat have the characteristic tuft of hair.

Homepage of Andreas Kiefer, one of the professors who first described this bat

Newly Described Mammals Week: Annamite Striped Rabbit (Nesolagus timminsi)

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This special rabbit is for two other special rabbits: Umi and Errol.

Here's a way to uncover new species that seems to be more common than you'd think: find them for sale as food in a market! That's how, in 1999, scientists "discovered" the Annamite striped rabbit, which is native to Vietnamese and Laotian mountains. (Someone needs to invent some kind information-sharing network that would allow people who live in species-rich places like the Laotian mountains or Borneo to share what they know with scientists. One of the scientists involved in finding the Annamite rabbit told the New York Times, regarding the team's trips to the market, "We had already made discoveries or rediscoveries of four new species…So we were kind of clued in to anything that looked weird.")

The rabbits are similar to the other species of striped rabbit, the Sumatran, and both are known for their red behinds. The Sumatran rabbit has only been seen once since 1916—that's how rare it is. The two striped species are separated by some 1,000 miles and thought to have diverged 8 million years ago.

Wildlife Conservation Society: "Bizarre Striped Rabbit Discovered in Asia"

Newly Described Mammals Week: Bornean Clouded Leopard (Neofelis diardi)

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Hi, mammals! I've learned many things since I started on my quest to draw every mammal species on earth. The most recent: business trips and a daily drawing blog just don't mix. I've been traveling a lot the past few weeks—a whole lot—and it doesn't look to let up until this summer. Sometimes that means I don't get to draw; sometimes that means I can't post my drawings. Please stick with me, though: I'm just as committed to this goal as ever, and your visits, comments, and general support mean the world to me!

This cat is an example of another way new mammal species are "discovered." Science has known about the clouded leopards that live on Borneo and Sumatra for quite a while, but always thought they were the same species as the clouded leopards that live elsewhere in southeast Asia. A scientist quoted in The Daily Mail, though, had a different idea:

"The moment we started comparing the skins of the mainland clouded leopard with the leopard found on Borneo, it was clear we were comparing two different species.

"It's incredible that no one has ever noticed these differences."

Isn't it, though? DNA testing confirmed that not only were the two kinds of leopard completely different species, they were, all the articles point out, as different from each other as lions are from tigers. The new species was officially described in 2007.

I suppose scientists are busy people, and no one had bothered to really think about this particular cat and whether it was a subspecies or a species or just slightly darker in color because of geographical variance or what. But clouded leopards were first described in 1821, the Bornean subspecies in 1823. That's nearly 200 years, people!

Science Daily: "New Species Declared: Clouded Leopard on Borneo and Sumatra"

Newly Described Mammals Week: Gray-Faced Sengi (Rhynchocyon udzungwensis)

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In 2005, scientists studying giant elephant-shrews (another name for sengis) in Tanzania set a camera trap that caught (on film) a creature they weren't expecting. Long-snouted and furry, it looked a lot like the black-and-rufous sengi, only bigger and with a gray face and a black behind. Sure enough, it turned out to be a brand-new species, first described in a scientific journal in 2006. It's the first new sengi species to be found in the last 126 years.

The gray-faced sengi is the largest (known) sengi. It lives in a very small forested area of Tanzania's mountains. Sengis were originally thought to be related to shrews, but now scientists seem to think they are actually related to elephants, aardvarks, and sea cows! Amazing! I think they're beautiful and I love to draw their colors. I hope science finds many more of these guys in the next 14 years.

Conservation International: "Scientists Discover New Species of Giant Elephant-Shrew"
California Academy of Sciences: "A new species of giant sengi (genus Rhynchocyon)"

Newly Described Mammals Week: Pygmy Three-Toed Sloth (Bradypus pygmaeus)

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This week, or for the next week, I should say, I'll be highlighting mammals "discovered" in the 21st century. (More often than not, people who live where the mammals in question do have known about them forever; it's scientists to whom the species are new, so I'm trying to use the word described rather than discovered where I can.)

Did you know that 95 percent of all animal species in the world are invertebrates? That means that the animals the average person actually considers animals—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians—make up only 5 percent of all the species on earth. Even though there are relatively very, very few mammal species to discover, even now, scientists haven't found them all. (At least, I assume they haven't. Maybe the GoldenPalace.com monkey will turn out to be one of the last mammals the scientific community finds. By the way, if you're hoping we can avoid calling it the GoldenPalace.com monkey by using its scientific name, no dice: it's Latin for "of the golden palace.")

The pygmy three-toed sloth was first described in 2001. It lives in Panama and is, as you'd suspect, a smaller relative of the three-toed sloths we've met before on the Daily Mammal. Like its cousins, it sleeps three quarters of the day, moves very slowly, swims like a champ, and, I just now learned, has fur covered with algae to camouflage it in the forest. Pygmy three-toed sloths are very endangered; I suppose we should be grateful we got to meet them at all.

The pygmy three-toed sloth on ARKive
The documentary Hanging with the Sloths

Extra mammal: Golden Lion Tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia)

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During the 24-Hour Mammalthon in December, or rather after it when I was catching up on my orders, I drew a golden lion tamarin for a boy named Tynan. Rebecca saw that drawing and loved it, and once I opened the Daily Mammal Original Art Shop, Rebecca requested a golden lion tamarin of her own! (You can request a mammal of your own, too.)

Since Rebecca really liked the original golden lion tamarin I did, I wanted the new one to be fairly similar to it, but I also didn't want to just copy it outright, thinking that would make it stiff, without the life and energy I want my drawings to have. So I started from the beginning, gathering images and doing sketches and everything like I would with a brand-new mammal, but keeping in mind what I remembered about the other drawing.


They turned out to be somewhat alike, but not entirely. One thing that's sort of amazed me during this nascent 14-year-long project is how much my drawing has evolved since I started last summer. Drawing every single day (almost) really has an incredible effect that I couldn't have predicted. Without my consciously changing anything, my drawing style has changed, and you can see it in this new tamarin.

So although it's not exactly the same, I hope you like this golden lion tamarin as much as you did the other one, Rebecca!

Cape Hunting Dog (Lycaon pictus)

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This African wild dog with big round ears and thin, mottled fur uses abandoned aardvark holes as dens to bear its pups. It lives in packs of around 10 dogs. Cape hunting dogs have what Walker's Mammals of the World calls "a largely undeserved reputation as an indiscriminate killer of livestock and valued game animals," which means, of course, that people have tended to take whatever opportunities they could to kill the dogs. This, combined with the usual habitat loss that's threatening animals all over the world, means that the Cape hunting dog is quite endangered. Another quote from Walker's:

Considering its immense former distribution and its scientific, cultural, and behavioral interest, the prospective disappearance of this genus from the wild at a time of supposed increasing emphasis on conservation values must rank as one of the great wildlife tragedies of the late twentieth century.

National Geographic News article about reintroducing Cape hunting dogs into the wild

PDF of a very short piece from the May 14, 1880, New York Times about the Cape hunting dog at the London Zoo. Sample quote:

It is a queer beast, with shifty ways that give it an appearance of irresolution and occasionally of crazy bewilderment, induced, no doubt, by the consciousness that its features justify its being looked upon as neither dog nor anything else, but something half-way toward the first hyena and about as far from the last wolf."

Five Species of Dormouse

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Hello from Orange, Texas, and the Holiday Inn Express. Here is a drawing of not one, not two, but count 'em, five dormice. And not only are there five dormice, but get this: they're five dormice of different species. (Yes, this is a strategy to speed up the drawing of the 2,000 or so rodents in the world.) Please be advised that they would not ordinarily be all together in a nest like this, living as they do in different areas and such. But you would be likely to find any one of the five sleeping if you found them at all: they're nocturnal, spending most of the day in a state of torpor and hibernating half the year.

Clockwise from the top left: Dryomys nitedula (forest dormouse), Eliomys melanurus (Asian garden dormouse), Glirulus japonicus (Japanese dormouse), Myomimus personatus (masked mouse-tailed dormouse), and Muscardinus avellanarius (hazel dormouse), the species immortalized in Alice in Wonderland.

This mammal is sold. Find another one to take home with you!

Free Daily Mammal Valentines

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Happy early Valentine's Day from The Daily Mammal! To thank you for supporting my quixotic quest by visiting this site and offering such wonderful encouraging comments and such, please download these free Daily Mammal valentines (note: this is a 5.6MB PDF)! You get the spotted skunk shown above, plus three more, which you can print, cut out, and share with your sweetheart!

Now, I have to apologize in advance for the spotty updating this blog is about to receive (and not because I'll be drawing leopards…). I'll be traveling on business from tomorrow until next Wednesday, so the mammals will be more sporadic than usual.

North Carolina Week: White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

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It's the last day of North Carolina Week, time to bid adieu—for now—to our Carolinian mammal friends. Looking back at us as we wave goodbye is this white-tailed deer.

White-tailed deer live from Canada to Central America, including nearly all of the United States. They are, according to Animal Diversity Web, the jumpiest, most nervous of our deer, and they swish their tails when they're anxious. They have scent glands on the bottoms of their feet and on their legs, and for them, the scents these glands produce are a form of communication. The deer are solitary much of the year, but they do form small groups in the winter.

Thanks for visiting some of North Carolina's beautiful mammals with me at The Daily Mammal! Now on to the rest of the world…

North Carolina Week: Woodland Jumping Mouse (Napaeozapus insignis)

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Hey, little fellow, what are you doing up and about? You should be hibernating with all your friends!

Woodland jumping mice hibernate for six months out of the year—roughly October to May—in burrows that they either dig or borrow from other little mammals. They like to eat fruit and seeds and mushrooms and insects. And lots of things like to eat them, too—bobcats, owls, rattlesnakes, skunks, wolves, etc., etc.!

You'll notice this one's extremely large hind legs. That's to help him jump—woodland jumping mice can jump a meter or more! I suspect the super-long tail helps in this somehow. Maybe Lisa, who requested a woodland jumping mouse, can tell us!

Take this mammal home with you!