Maned wolf
Chrysocyon brachyurus
— Where the name comes from
Chrysocyon is “golden dog”, from the Greek khrysós and kýōn, for the vivid tawny coat. Brachyurus means “short-tailed” and is a blunder by the describer: the tail is not short at all. In Portuguese it is the lobo-guará, where guará comes from Tupi and means red. And it is neither wolf nor fox: it is the only species in its genus, with no close living relatives.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Carnivores
- Habitat
- Cerrado, shrubby savannah, wet grassland
- Range
- Central Brazil, Paraguay, eastern Bolivia, northern Argentina
- Size
- 95–132 cm of body, 20–30 kg, up to 107 cm at the shoulder
- Diet
- Omnivore — half fruit, the lobeira above all, half small animals
- Lifespan
- 12–15 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the tallest canid in the world, entirely thanks to disproportionate legs.
- 02
About half its diet is plant matter, which is very rare among carnivores.
- 03
Its urine has an intense sulphurous smell, strong enough to be mistaken for cannabis.
— What sets it apart
Those very long legs are not for running — it is a poor sprinter — but for seeing: in the tall grass of the cerrado they let it look over the vegetation, like walking on stilts through a wheat field. And half its food is a fruit, the lobeira, which in Portuguese is literally “wolf plant”: the animal is its chief disperser, and seeds that pass through its gut germinate better. Predator and plant have domesticated one another.
