Southern tree hyrax
Dendrohyrax arboreus
— Where the name comes from
Dendrohyrax is “tree hyrax”, from the Greek déndron and hýrax, which meant “shrew”. Arboreus repeats it in Latin. The Greek name is a double error: it is not a shrew and it is not a rodent. Its closest living relatives are the elephants and the sirenians — an animal the size of a rabbit that shares an ancestor with the sea cow and the proboscidean.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Hyraxes
- Habitat
- Rainforest and montane forest, in hollow trees
- Range
- Eastern and southern Africa, from Kenya to South Africa
- Size
- 32–60 cm, 1.5–4.5 kg
- Diet
- Herbivore — leaves, shoots, fruit, bark
- Lifespan
- 10–12 years
— Characteristics
- 01
The soles of its feet have damp pads that work as suckers on bark.
- 02
Its upper incisors grow continuously and are tusks in miniature, as in elephants.
- 03
It regulates its temperature poorly: it warms in the sun and huddles with its own kind.
— What sets it apart
Its night call is one of the most unnerving things to be heard in an African forest: a sequence of creaks that accelerate into a strangled shriek, repeated for minutes and audible a kilometre away. Anyone hearing it for the first time thinks of an animal in agony or of something supernatural, and in the folklore of several regions it is tied to spirits. It is the territorial call of a three-kilo herbivore related to elephants.
