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Carnegie Museum of Natural History

One of the Four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

Sarah Shelley

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March Mammal Madness

In case you missed it, March Mammal Madness has already started! What you may say is that?

As an alternative to College Basketball’s March Madness, Dr. Katie Hinde, currently at Arizona State University, began a bracket tournament that pits mammals against one another and sometimes other odd creatures.

The Section of Mammals is very excited about this year’s tournament with all staff members having made their predictions. Three of us have picked the Bengal tiger as the ultimate champion, one has the small spotted cat shark, and two others have chosen tag teams (coyote & badger on the one hand and batfly and gammaproteobacteria on the other).

For more details on this year’s tournament, click here.

march mammal madness brackets hung up on a wall

The only repercussion so far is that our lunch time includes a certain amount of trash talk. One of the upsets in the first round was the streaked tenrec defeating the markhor (a small hedgehog-like mammal versus a large screw-horned goat). The markhor had the advantage of size and home turf, but the tenrec won by poking the markhor in the face with its quills.

photo of tenrec and markhor

John Wible is Curator in the Section of Mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences working at the museum.

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F is for Fox

For inhabitants of Western Pennsylvania, the word ‘fox’ as applied to an animal is usually reserved for the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) because if you have seen a fox in an urban area, that is the most likely one you would have seen. Although chiefly nocturnal in its habits, red foxes do venture out during daylight hours. But the red fox is only one of 23 different species of foxes. In fact, 61% of all species in the canid or dog family are foxes; the remainder are dogs, wolves, and jackals.

You might be wondering, what exactly is a fox? A fox is a canid that is distinguished by its pointy snout and bushy tail. In fact, fox comes from an old Germanic word for tail. The collective noun for a group of foxes is a skulk, a leash, or an earth. Males foxes can be referred to as dogs, reynards, or tods, females as vixens, and young as kits, pups, or cubs.

Not all foxes are closely related to each other. There are three main groups. One group is found exclusively in South America and includes eight species; a second group of two species is found in the Americas; and the third and largest group, which includes the red fox, is found all over the world except in South America and Antarctica.

All foxes look like foxes, but they display a remarkable array of behaviors and lifestyles depending on where they live. The two species found in Western Pennsylvania are the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargentatus). These two are distinguished by their coats, as well as a useful feature on their skulls. Mammals that have strong chewing muscles have prominent ridges on their skulls for muscle attachment. These are called temporal lines. As seen in the photo below, the gray fox has U-shaped temporal lines (i.e., U for Urocyon) and the red fox has V-shaped temporal lines (i.e., V for Vulpes). A convenient coincidence for biologists!

two fox skulls on a black background
Skulls of a gray fox (Urocyon) and red fox (Vulpes) from the Section of Mammals collection, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

One of our favorite foxes is the Fennec fox (Vulpes zerda). This is the smallest living fox weighing in at less than two kilograms but despite its diminutive size it has the greatest ear size to body size ratio of any fox (see picture below). This little fox is a true survivor, living in one of the harshest environments on the planet: the shifting sand dunes of the Sahara Desert. Their huge ears act as amplifiers providing them with acute hearing for hunting and capturing prey at night. Their ears have an additional purpose – temperature regulation (quite important when you live in one of the hottest environments on Earth). Fennec foxes use the large surface area of their ears to cool their blood. Like dogs, Fennec foxes also have another adaptation for regulating their temperature – they pant. They only start to pant when temperatures reach 95°F, and their breathing rate can increase from 23 breaths per minute to 690 breaths per minute! Get a closer look at a Fennec fox in the Hall of African Wildlife on the second floor of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Photograph of a Fennec fox and a jerboa from the Hall of African Wildlife, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Photograph of a Fennec fox and a jerboa from the Hall of African Wildlife, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Sarah Shelley is a postdoctoral research fellow and John Wible is Curator in the Section of Mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences working at the museum.

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C is for Cats

by Sarah Shelley and John Wible

We don’t want to start a big fight about cats versus dogs, but here in the Section of Mammals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History we are officially cat people! There are pros and cons to both as pets, but for us the pros for cats outweigh the litterbox scooping and hairballs. When we see dog owners with those bags inverted on their hands to pick up … we are happy we are cat people.

Meet Our Cats

black cat with clothespin

This is Roux, Sarah’s cat. Her favorite toy is a clothespin, despite all the expensive ones that Sarah buys for her. Roux thinks it is a hat. She is nine years-old and all black apart from her face full of white whiskers.

black cat on a blanket

Whiskers or vibrissae, to use their technical term, are very thick hairs that are highly sensitive. Although cats have great eyesight for distance, movement, and night vision, they are short-sighted, which means they don’t see well what is right in front of them. The whiskers counteract their short-sightedness.

Cats don’t just have whiskers on their faces. They also have them on the inside of their front legs. The function of these is less obvious, but they likely aid in climbing and hunting.

three cats

Another fun fact? A group of cats is called a clowder. This is John’s cat clowder: Boots, Bela, and Phoenix. All three are rescues. Boots is the oldest, but we really don’t know how old she is. Bela and Phoenix are two, although not sisters.

Boots rules the kitchen and really likes to rub against bags or boxes on the kitchen counter. She is using scent glands on the side of her face to mark what is hers. Cats often do this to their owners when they return home to make them smell familiar again. They don’t just have scent glands on their faces. Amongst the other places are the pads on their paws, which helps explain their kneading behavior.

gray and white cat on a laptop

Why is Boots sitting on the computer? She is keeping an eye on the mouse.

Bela is a bit of a weirdo, perched on a box of peaches. It does not look very comfortable. She is a tabby, actually a mackerel tabby, which is not a specific cat breed, but a distinctive coat pattern. The word tabby comes from Attabiyah, a neighborhood in Baghdad, Iraq, which is famous for a type of silk. Tabbies got their name because their striped coats resemble the wavy patterns in the Attabiyah silk.

Did you know that domestic cats are not the only cats that like boxes? Check out this video of big cats playing in boxes.

tabby cat in a box of peaches

If you think Bela is weird, check out where Phoenix likes to chill. Is this what they mean by curiosity killing the cat or a cool cat? (Don’t worry, she didn’t stay in the fridge too long.)

orange cat in the fridge

She parked herself with the lettuce and not the ice cream and it’s no wonder why: cats don’t taste sweetness. But they do have an extra sensory organ that humans don’t have, called the vomeronasal organ. This paired organ sits in the floor of the nasal cavity and is connected to the oral cavity by ducts located behind the incisor teeth. To get a particular odor into the vomeronasal organ, cats make a funny face called the Flehmen response where they open their mouth, wrinkle their lips, and stop breathing, as demonstrated by Roux. The vomeronasal organ is for pheromone perception.

black cat

So, here’s a mammalogy joke: what do you call a cat that just ate a mallard? A duck-filled fatty puss!

Sarah Shelley is a postdoctoral research fellow and John Wible is Curator in the Section of Mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences working at the museum.

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B is for Beaver (sticks)

by Sarah Shelley

The Section of Mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History houses nearly 130,000 specimens. As a fairly recent hire in the section, I have spent the last six months familiarizing myself with the contents of the boxes, drawers and jars and the many delights they contain. Just recently, Curator of Mammals, John Wible, and I were rummaging through one of the older cabinets in the section. In these cabinets are boxes containing old exhibit specimens including skulls sliced in half, some pelts and even some jars of owl pellets containing rodent bones.

Sliced beaver skull
Sliced beaver skull

In one of the drawers my eyes fell upon a small bundle of sticks. I picked them up, somewhat bemused.

‘What are these?’ I asked.

‘Those are beaver sticks.’ Replied John.

small beaver sticks
A bundle of (small) beaver sticks

And sure enough, upon closer inspection, it was possible to see small gnaw marks on the sticks. We continued our rummaging and in the next drawer found another bundle of larger sticks.

‘And those are big beaver sticks.’

big beaver stick
A big beaver stick with gnaw marks

Beavers are large, semiaquatic rodents. There are two living species, the North American beaver (Castor canadensis) and the slightly larger Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber). During the Ice Age there was even a giant beaver (Castoroides) that was about two meters long and thought to weigh approximately 100 kg (four times more than the average living beaver).

Beavers use sticks and logs to dam rivers and build their dens, known as ‘lodges.’ They use their enlarged front incisors to break down plants and trees. Their front teeth grow continuously and are stained red by an iron pigment that serves to strengthen the tooth enamel against wear.

North American beaver skull
A North American beaver (Castor canadensis) skull showing its enlarged front incisor teeth

Sarah Shelley is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Section of Mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences working at the museum.