Wild Mammals, But Orderly Trivia Quiz

Answer: Primates

All monkeys, apes, and human beings are primates. So are lemurs and tarsiers, but being more "primitive" they are sometimes called 'prosimian', meaning "before monkeys and apes".

How important is a nose? Lemurs are also called strepsirrhines (from the Greek for "twisted nose"). New World monkeys like marmosets, capuchins, and howlers are platyrrhines ("broad-nosed"). Human beings, Old World monkeys (baboons, macaques) and apes (gorillas, chimps) are catarrhines ("hook-nosed"). The apes have historically been divided in the lesser (gibbons, siamangs) of Asia and the great (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutangs) of Africa.

Historically, hominid referred to modern humans and extinct relatives like Neanderthals, but now it is used to mean ALL great apes, including the naked ape that is man.

Answer: Rodentia

Rodents subdivide rather neatly into the "squirrel-like" sciuromorphs (squirrel, gopher, woodchuck, prairie dog, chipmunk), the "mouse-like" myomorphs (mice, rats, hamsters, gerbils, voles, muskrats), and the "porcupine-like" hystricomorphs (porcupine, capybara, cavy, agouti, chinchilla).

The "hare-like" lagomorphs (rabbits, hares) now get their own order, Lagomorpha, and are NOT rodents (although once upon a time naturalists put them there) as they have a separate genetic ancestry.

Rodentia means "gnawing ones". All rodents have chisel-shaped front teeth that grow until they die, and therefore they must gnaw constantly to wear them down. They avoid wearing the back teeth, which are not ever-growing, by jutting the lower jaw forward to gnaw.

Answer: Carnivora

And your little dog, too! All felines, canines, and ursines (bears) are carnivores, as are weasels and pinnipeds (seals and sea lions). The hyena, the otter, the raccoon, the mink, and the mongoose also belong to order Carnivora, as do the meerkat and the skunk.

But don't be confused, for not all carnivorous mammals are in order Carnivora (e.g. the killer whale), and not all members of Carnivora eat meat (e.g. the giant panda), so we use 'carnivoran' rather than 'carnivore' to mean members of this diverse order.

They do however share cranial traits in common, including a relatively large brain, and their jaws can only move vertically (no side-to-side motion).

Answer: Eulipotyphla

'Eulipotyphla' means "truly fat and blind". These animals were once classified in Insectivora ("insect-eating"), a wastepaper taxon for a number of small mammals who fit nowhere else. For example, they couldn't be in Rodentia because they have teeth with sharp, conical cusps that cease growing -- not the long, gnawing, ever-growing incisors that rodents have.

True moles are indeed fat (really, cylindrical) and blind (or in some cases very near-sighted). The hedgehog is spiny and resembles the porcupine (a rodent). True shrews are among the tiniest mammals, yet they are quite ferocious. The shrew shares the bat's ability to use echolocation, but the shrew's twittering has low amplitude and is frequency-modulated (whereas a bat's "sonar" relies on high frequencies with amplitude modulation) and will only use it for environmental orientation, not for spotting food.

Other members of the former Insectivora include the venomous solenodon and the musky moonrat, which remain in Eulipotyphla. The common tenrec and the golden mole (gouemol) are now in Afrosoricida. Treeshrews and elephant shrews (which are not true shrews) also each have their own order now. 'Insectivore' remains an acceptable term to denote animals that eat insects, just as 'carnivores' eat flesh and 'herbivores' eat plants.

Answer: Monotremata (egg-laying mammals)

The duck-billed platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) and the spiny anteater (or echidna) nurse their young as all mammals do, but lay eggs, as no other mammals do. They are named monotremes for the one hole (the cloaca) through which both urine and feces pass (whereas placental mammals have separate orifices). These unique animals are found in Oceania (esp. Australia) and nowhere else.

Monotremes have historically been called 'prototherians' ("first beasts"), in comparison with 'metatherians' ("changed beasts") or marsupials, and 'eutherians' ("true beasts") or placental mammals, but where this nomenclature fits in the taxonomy of Mammalia has been in flux.

Answer: Proboscidea

An elephant is of course distinguished by its size and its trunk -- i.e. its 'proboscis', a long and mobile nose. Elephants, rhinos, tapirs, hippos, and hogs were once classified together as Pachydermata ("thick-skinned"). Now elephants get an order all to themselves, Proboscidea, as mastodons and woolly mammoths died out in the Ice Age.

By the way, a tapir's snout is a proboscis, too, although it is of course much shorter than an elephant's trunk, but the tapirs of tropical America and Malaysia are ordered with the Perissodactyla (the odd-toed hoofed mammals).

Answer: Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates)

'Perissodactyla' is from the Greek for "odd-toed". An ungulate walks on hooves, as opposed to an 'unguiculate'*, which has nails or claws. Horses, asses, and mules are domesticated members of order Perissodactyla and like the zebra walk on one toe, the undivided hoof.

Rhinos walk on three toes, and their hooves cover only only the edge; the bottoms are quite soft. Tapirs have three toes in front and four toes in back (also soft-bottomed) but they are still grouped with odd-toed ungulates because, like rhinos and equines, they have an enlarged third toe which serves as the foot's main axis. Perissodactyls tend to have a long upper jaw and an elongated head, and all the wild members are threatened or endangered.

[*]'Unguiculate' is not a word used much in modern zoology since it describes every mammal -- from wildcats to wolves to moles to mice to monkeys -- that doesn't have hooves.

Answer: Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates)

Some antelopes have four toes, others have two, but they vary even more according to habitat. For example, the addax of northern Africa has wide hooves with flat undersides to keep afloat in desert sands. Hippos have four functional, wide-splayed toes. Some even-toed ungulates such as antelopes chew the cud and are called ruminants.

If a hoofed animals has two toes, such as deer and bison, it has historically been called "cloven-hoofed", but that term has diabolic associations.

In the olden days, 'Ungulata' was an order by itself comprising all hoofed mammals, but by the twentieth century its members were distributed among separate orders: Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates), Aritodactyla (even-toed ungulates), and Proboscidea (the elephants and their ancestors).

Answer: Sirenia (the "sirens")

The sirens of the sea (though they don't actually sing) are the dugongs and the manatees, both of which are terrifically endangered; Steller's sea cow is extinct. The mariners of yore mistook them for sirens and/or mermaids, hence the name. Sirenians, though they must breathe air, never leave the water; they are truly aquatic, like the cetaceans (whales and dolphins). Slow-moving, herbivorous sirenians swim mostly in tropical coastal waters, though one manatee species lives in the Amazon River.

Answer: Chiroptera ("hand-winged")

"Flying fox" is just another common name for the fruit bat (genus Pteropus). Flying foxes are megabats, that is, big bats of the Old World. Flying foxes in particular flit about tropical and sub-tropical East Africa, Asia, and Australia. Vampire bats (subfamily Desmodontinae) are microbats; they are small, and as their name suggests, they feed only on blood, and only in Central and South America. Vampire bats and other microbats of the Americas and Eurasia use echolocation to pinpoint food, but megabats, for the most part, lack this ability.

The order Chiroptera is occupied solely by bats, but it is the second-largest order of mammals, after Rodentia, with a wide diversity of species.