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Lesser Hedgehog Tenrec
The lesser hedgehog tenrec (''Echinops telfairi'') is a species of mammal in the family Tenrecidae. It is the only species in the genus ''Echinops'' and is named in honour of Charles Telfair. It is endemic to Madagascar. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical dry forests, shrubland, and shrubland and dry savanna. Description The lesser hedgehog tenrec is a small, stout-bodied animal similar to a hedgehog, hence the name. Their tails are short, their limbs and muzzles are of moderate length, and their ears are prominent. The entire dorsum is covered with sharp spines. Color is usually yellow buff; individuals range from near white to almost black. Head and body length is . Weight is about . Lesser hedgehog tenrecs (like all tenrecs) have a cloaca (common uro-genital opening), like a bird or a reptile. Behavior This tenrec is terrestrial. It spends its daytime hours resting under a log, a pile of branches, leaves, straws or in a hollow tree, although trees are widely ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Charles Linnaeus Martin
William Charles Linnaeus Martin (1798–1864) was an England, English natural history, naturalist. Biography William Charles Linnaeus Martin was the son of William Martin (naturalist), William Martin (naturalist) and his wife, Mary. William Martin had published early colour books on the fossils of Derbyshire, and named his son Linnaeus in honour of his interest in the classification of living things. Martin was the curator of the museum of the Zoological Society of London from 1830 to 1838, when he lost his appointment due to financial cutbacks. He then became a freelance natural history writer, publishing over a thousand articles and books, including ''A Natural History of Quadrupeds and other Mammiferous Animals'' (1841), ''The History of the Dog'' (1845), ''The History of the Horse'' (1845), and ''Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature'' (1848-9). Many of Martin's works centred around the study of farm animals, particularly in the years 1847-1858.Woodward, B. B., and Yolanda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acanthocephala
Acanthocephala (Greek , ', thorn + , ', head) is a phylum of parasitic worms known as acanthocephalans, thorny-headed worms, or spiny-headed worms, characterized by the presence of an eversible proboscis, armed with spines, which it uses to pierce and hold the gut wall of its host. Acanthocephalans have complex life cycles, involving at least two hosts, which may include invertebrates, fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals. About 1420 species have been described. The Acanthocephala were thought to be a discrete phylum. Recent genome analysis has shown that they are descended from, and should be considered as, highly modified rotifers. This unified taxon is known as Syndermata. History The earliest recognisable description of Acanthocephala – a worm with a proboscis armed with hooks – was made by Italian author Francesco Redi (1684).Crompton 1985, p. 27 In 1771, Joseph Koelreuter proposed the name Acanthocephala. Philipp Ludwig Statius Müller independently called th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mammals Described In 1838
Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or hair, and three middle ear bones. These characteristics distinguish them from reptiles (including birds) from which they diverged in the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago. Around 6,400 extant species of mammals have been described divided into 29 orders. The largest orders, in terms of number of species, are the rodents, bats, and Eulipotyphla (hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and others). The next three are the Primates (including humans, apes, monkeys, and others), the Artiodactyla ( cetaceans and even-toed ungulates), and the Carnivora (cats, dogs, seals, and others). In terms of cladistics, which reflects evolutionary history, mammals are the only living members of the Synapsida (synapsids); this clade, together wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mammals Of Madagascar
Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or hair, and three middle ear bones. These characteristics distinguish them from reptiles (including birds) from which they diverged in the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago. Around 6,400 extant species of mammals have been described divided into 29 orders. The largest orders, in terms of number of species, are the rodents, bats, and Eulipotyphla (hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and others). The next three are the Primates (including humans, apes, monkeys, and others), the Artiodactyla (cetaceans and even-toed ungulates), and the Carnivora (cats, dogs, seals, and others). In terms of cladistics, which reflects evolutionary history, mammals are the only living members of the Synapsida (synapsids); this clade, together with Sauropsida ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afrosoricida
The order Afrosoricida (a Latin-Greek compound name which means "looking like African shrews") contains the golden moles of Southern Africa, the otter shrews of equatorial Africa and the tenrecs of Madagascar. These three families of small mammals have traditionally been considered to be a part of the order Insectivora, and were later included in Lipotyphla after Insectivora was abandoned as a wastebasket taxon, before Lipotyphla was also found to be polyphyletic. Naming Some biologists use Tenrecomorpha as the name for the tenrec-golden mole clade, but Gary Bronner and Paulina Jenkins argue that Afrosoricida is more appropriate, despite their misgivings about the similarity between the name "Afrosoricida" and the unrelated shrew subgenus ''Afrosorex''. However, ''Afrosorex'' Hutterer, 1986 is a synonym of ''Crocidura'' Wagler, 1832, eliminating any confusion. Hedges discussed at length the problems with using Tenrecomorpha and other proposed names for this clade of mammals other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ensembl
Ensembl genome database project is a scientific project at the European Bioinformatics Institute, which provides a centralized resource for geneticists, molecular biologists and other researchers studying the genomes of our own species and other vertebrates and model organisms. Ensembl is one of several well known genome browsers for the retrieval of genomic information. Similar databases and browsers are found at NCBI and the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). History The human genome consists of three billion base pairs, which code for approximately 20,000–25,000 genes. However the genome alone is of little use, unless the locations and relationships of individual genes can be identified. One option is manual annotation, whereby a team of scientists tries to locate genes using experimental data from scientific journals and public databases. However this is a slow, painstaking task. The alternative, known as automated annotation, is to use the power of computers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exotic Pet
An exotic pet is a pet which is relatively rare or unusual to keep, or is generally thought of as a wild species rather than as a domesticated pet. The definition varies by culture, location, and over time—as animals become firmly enough established in the world of animal fancy, they may no longer be considered ''exotic''. Definitions The definition is an evolving one; some rodents, reptiles, and amphibians have become firmly enough established in the world of animal fancy to no longer be considered exotic. Sometimes any unique or wild-looking pet (including common domestic animals such as the ferret and the rat) is considered an exotic pet. "Exotic" often refers to a species which is not native or indigenous to the owner's locale, and "pet" is a companion animal living with people. However, many use the term to include native species as well (e.g., snakes may sometimes be considered exotic as pets even in places where they are found in the wild). The international organi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Promoniliformis Ovocristatus
Moniliformidae is a family of parasitic spiny-headed (or thorny-headed) worms. It is the only family in the Moniliformida order and contains three genera: ''Australiformis'' containing a single species, ''Moniliformis'' containing eighteen species and ''Promoniliformis'' containing a single species. Genetic analysis have determined that the clade is monophyletic despite being distributed globally. These worms primarily parasitize mammals, including humans in the case of ''Moniliformis moniliformis'', and occasionally birds by attaching themselves into the intestinal wall using their hook-covered proboscis. The intermediate hosts are mostly cockroaches. The distinguishing features of this order among archiacanthocephalans is the presence of a cylindrical proboscis with long rows of hooks with posteriorly directed roots and proboscis retractor muscles that pierce both the posterior and ventral end or just posterior end of the receptacle. Infestation with Monoliformida species can cau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cloaca
In animal anatomy, a cloaca ( ), plural cloacae ( or ), is the posterior orifice that serves as the only opening for the digestive, reproductive, and urinary tracts (if present) of many vertebrate animals. All amphibians, reptiles and birds, and a few mammals ( monotremes, tenrecs, golden moles, and marsupial moles), have this orifice, from which they excrete both urine and feces; this is in contrast to most placental mammals, which have two or three separate orifices for evacuation. Excretory openings with analogous purpose in some invertebrates are also sometimes referred to as cloacae. Mating through the cloaca is known as cloacal copulation, commonly referred to as cloacal kiss. The cloacal region is also often associated with a secretory organ, the cloacal gland, which has been implicated in the scent-marking behavior of some reptiles, marsupials, amphibians, and monotremes. Etymology The word is from the Latin verb ''cluo'', "(I) cleanse", thus the noun ''cloaca'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mammal
Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or hair, and three middle ear bones. These characteristics distinguish them from reptiles (including birds) from which they diverged in the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago. Around 6,400 extant species of mammals have been described divided into 29 orders. The largest orders, in terms of number of species, are the rodents, bats, and Eulipotyphla (hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and others). The next three are the Primates (including humans, apes, monkeys, and others), the Artiodactyla ( cetaceans and even-toed ungulates), and the Carnivora (cats, dogs, seals, and others). In terms of cladistics, which reflects evolutionary history, mammals are the only living members of the Synapsida (synapsids); this clade, together with Saur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hedgehog
A hedgehog is a spiny mammal of the subfamily Erinaceinae, in the eulipotyphlan family Erinaceidae. There are seventeen species of hedgehog in five genera found throughout parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and in New Zealand by introduction. There are no hedgehogs native to Australia and no living species native to the Americas. However, the extinct genus ''Amphechinus'' was once present in North America. Hedgehogs share distant ancestry with shrews (family Soricidae), with gymnures possibly being the intermediate link, and they have changed little over the last fifteen million years. Like many of the first mammals, they have adapted to a nocturnal way of life. Their spiny protection resembles that of porcupines, which are rodents, and echidnas, a type of monotreme. Etymology The name ''hedgehog'' came into use around the year 1450, derived from the Middle English ''heyghoge'', from ''heyg'', ''hegge'' ("hedge"), because it frequents hedgerows, and ''hoge'', ''hogge'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
