Long-tailed chinchilla
Chinchilla lanigera
— Where the name comes from
Chinchilla is American Spanish and comes almost certainly from the Chincha, an Andean people who wore cloaks made of this fur: the suffix -illa adds the idea of smallness. Lanigera is Latin, “wool-bearing”, from lana and gerere. The name therefore says the same thing twice — the people of the cloak and the woolly animal — and both times it speaks of us who wear it, not of the animal.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Rodents
- Habitat
- Arid rocky slopes of the Andes, between 400 and 1,600 metres
- Range
- Northern Chile, in a few relict populations
- Size
- 22–26 cm long plus 13 of tail, 400–600 g
- Diet
- Herbivore — dry grasses, seeds, bark, cactus
- Lifespan
- 10 years in the wild, over 15 in captivity
— Characteristics
- 01
Up to eighty hairs grow from each follicle: in humans one, in a dog two or three.
- 02
It cannot get wet — the fur holds water and goes mouldy — and washes by rolling in volcanic ash.
- 03
It sheds tufts of fur on the instant if seized, leaving the predator a handful of wool and nothing else.
— What sets it apart
The same density that made it the rodent most coveted by the fur trade brought it to the edge of extinction: between the 19th century and the early 20th, Chile exported millions of pelts, and over a hundred were needed for a single coat. Almost every farmed chinchilla in the world descends from eleven animals taken to the United States in 1923 by a mining engineer, Mathias Chapman, who spent three years bringing them slowly down from the Andes so they would not die of the heat.
