Field notebook
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Field notebook
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Taxonomic class
This practical browse label comes from the published animal profiles. Taxonomy changes as evidence improves; individual source records remain the authority.
The ground pangolin's tongue does not attach at the throat like most mammals. Instead it runs back to the pelvis, letting the animal unfurl a probe longer than its own body deep into insect nests.
Before reaching sexual maturity, female fossas grow an enlarged, spine-covered pseudo-penis and rust-orange fur matching adult males, a disguise thought to reduce harassment, then lose both traits within a couple of years.
Toxic saliva from the short-tailed shrew's submandibular gland can immobilise invertebrates and small vertebrates. The shrew stores paralysed but living prey, keeping a fresh larder through periods when hunting is poor.
Beneath the long outer skirt sits qiviut, a downy underlayer shed in sheets each spring. Its fibres measure in the low teens of micrometres, finer than most cashmere, and it is one of the warmest natural fibres collected anywhere.
Only some male Asian elephants grow tusks, and females essentially never do. What female and tuskless male Asian elephants have instead are tushes, short teeth that rarely project beyond the lip.
Cane toads kill northern quolls that try to eat them. Conservation biologists have used sausages of toad meat laced with a nausea-inducing chemical to teach naive quolls that toads are not food, before releasing them into toad-infested country.
The name colobus comes from a Greek word meaning mutilated. Their hands carry only a small tubercle where a thumb would be, turning the hand into a hook that swings through branches quickly, at the cost of a grip that can pinch.
In the Taï Forest of Côte d'Ivoire, chimpanzees crack armoured nuts with stone and wooden hammers. Infants watch and fumble for years before they succeed, and whole populations living beside the same nuts and the same stones never crack them at all.
An aye-aye drums a branch with a wire-thin middle finger, several taps per second, while swivelling its ears to read the echoes. Where the sound reveals a cavity, it gnaws through with rodent-like incisors and hooks the larva out with that same slender finger.
A honey badger's hide is thick and only weakly attached along much of its body. An animal seized by the back of the neck can rotate inside its own skin far enough to bite whatever is holding it.
A squirrel monkey's brain is roughly one-fortieth of its body mass, a higher proportion than in humans, whose ratio is nearer one in fifty. The comparison is real but misleading, because small animals routinely carry proportionally larger brains.
A patch of specialised quills on the streaked tenrec's back can be vibrated against one another to produce a high-pitched signal. Stridulation is common in insects; among mammals, this is the only case known.
Analysis of hundreds of indri songs found intervals clustering at ratios of one to one and one to two, the same categorical rhythms that underlie human music. It was the first such pattern reported in a non-human mammal.
Devil facial tumour disease is not caused by a virus. The cancer cells themselves pass from animal to animal through biting, making it one of only a handful of transmissible cancers known in nature.
A female water opossum dives with young aboard. A ring of muscle draws her rear-opening pouch closed and a greasy secretion seals it, keeping the young dry through dives that last well under a minute.
This long-necked antelope of the dry Horn of Africa appears to meet its water needs entirely from the leaves it browses. Observers report no confirmed drinking even where water is available nearby.
The shoulder hump that identifies a grizzly is not fat or bone but a mass of muscle anchoring the forelimbs. It powers the digging that supplies much of the bear's food, and it distinguishes grizzlies from black bears at a glance.
In deep hibernation a groundhog's core temperature falls to within a few degrees of its burrow, its heartbeat drops from roughly a hundred beats a minute to a handful, and it breathes only a few times a minute. It is not sleeping; it is running a different metabolism.
Satellite tags on Cuvier's beaked whales have logged a dive of 3 hours and 42 minutes off North Carolina, and a separate record depth of 2,992 metres off southern California. Both are the deepest and longest dives recorded for any mammal.
Botos are born grey and many adults turn pink, but the colour is not evenly distributed. Males are pinker than females, and the pinkest males are those carrying the most bite marks from fights with other males.
Silver-haired bats do not use caves. They wedge themselves into the gap between loose bark and the trunk of a standing dead tree, a roost that lasts a season or two, which means the species depends on forests that are allowed to keep their snags.
In the 1990s the common dolphin was divided into short-beaked and long-beaked species on the strength of body shape. Later genetic work showed that long-beaked forms had arisen independently in several regions, and in 2016 they were folded back into one species.
Ancient DNA published in 2021 showed the dire wolf diverged from the lineage leading to grey wolves, coyotes and dogs several million years ago, with no sign of interbreeding. Its resemblance to a grey wolf is convergence, and it has been moved to its own genus.
A rock-wallaby's hind feet are short and broad with thick, roughened pads and reduced claws. Traction comes from friction against rock rather than from hooking into it, which is what lets them cross near-vertical faces at speed.
Its patagium runs from the shoulder blades to the fore paws, from the fingertips to the toes, and from the hind legs to the tip of the tail, including the webbing between digits. Glides of about seventy metres are routine.
Northern white-cheeked gibbons once sang in the forests of southern Yunnan. Repeated surveys since the late 2000s have failed to find any, and the species is now generally considered extinct in China, surviving only in Laos and Viet Nam.
Plains and mountain zebras live in stable family groups led by a stallion. Grevy's zebra does not. Males defend large territories around water and grazing, and females associate loosely, joining and leaving without lasting bonds.