Fossa
Cryptoprocta ferox
— Where the name comes from
Cryptoprocta is, without circumlocution, “hidden anus”, from the Greek kryptós and prōktós: the describer was struck by the anal pouch that conceals the opening, and there has been no going back since. Ferox is Latin, “fierce”. The Malagasy common name is fosa, pronounced “foosa”, and refers precisely to the strong smell of those glands.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Carnivores
- Habitat
- Every forest in Madagascar, from rainforest to dry spiny thicket
- Range
- Endemic to Madagascar
- Size
- 70–80 cm of body plus a tail nearly as long, 5.5–8.6 kg
- Diet
- Carnivore — lemurs for more than half the diet, then tenrecs, birds, reptiles
- Lifespan
- 15–20 years in captivity
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the largest carnivore in Madagascar and the chief predator of lemurs.
- 02
Its ankles rotate and its tail acts as a balance: it hunts in the trees with feline agility.
- 03
It is not a cat: the Malagasy carnivores all descend from a single mongoose-like ancestor.
— What sets it apart
It looks like a puma in miniature and is related to mongooses. All of Madagascar’s carnivores — the fossa, the fanaloka, the Malagasy mongooses — descend from a single animal that crossed the Mozambique Channel on a floating log between twenty and thirty million years ago, and from there diversified to fill niches that elsewhere belong to cats, civets and mustelids. The fossa is the far end of that radiation: the place of the big cat, taken by a descendant of mongooses.
