In Praise of Binturongs

(satyrs.eu)

17 points | by surprisetalk 3 days ago ago

5 comments

  • EdwardDiego 4 hours ago

    A binturong looks like Paddington Bear's cousin who moved onto harder drugs than marmalade, and hasn't had a hit a in a few days, and is doing it hard.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Binturon...

  • ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago

    Didn't know about the critters. Looks like another mustelid (weasel), but seems to behave more like a cat.

    Not my area of expertise, but they sure are cute.

    • thaumasiotes 2 hours ago

      > Looks like another mustelid (weasel), but seems to behave more like a cat.

      It's a viverrid, the branch of the cat family (OK, wikipedia has feliforms as a "suborder") that evolved into cat-weasels.

      Weasels themselves are mustelids, caniforms rather than feliforms. Convergent evolution has produced a weasel body type across multiple taxa of carnivores.

      (If that's your thing, you might enjoy how the Tasmanian tiger is a marsupial that is, from the head, clearly though incorrectly identifiable as a dog.)

      Though if you look at the words, "viverrids" means [descendants of] ferrets and "mustelids" means [descendants of] weasels, whereas ferrets themselves are taxonomically mustelids, not viverrids. So the viverrids are incorrectly named.