2023-08-31 11:17:55
Researchers have discovered Switzerland’s 100th wild mammal species. It is the actually widespread western dormouse. So far it has not been confirmed that it is a separate species.
Researchers from the Natural History Museums in Geneva and St. Gallen have found in the genetic analysis of the Swiss dormouse that dormouse from eastern Switzerland and western Switzerland are genetically different from each other, as the Geneva museum announced on Thursday.
So there is not just one species of dormouse in Switzerland, but two: the western dormouse (Muscardinus speciosus) and the eastern dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius). According to the announcement, their distribution areas hardly overlap.
In a way, the new species of western dormouse is a rediscovery. Naturalists had already suspected in the last century that this might be a separate species. Only DNA tests made it possible to confirm this. The scientific name of the species (Muscardinus speciosus) is not new either. It was awarded in this way as early as 1855 by the German naturalist Anton Dehne, as the Natural History Museum of the City of Geneva wrote.
Dormice are stealthy animals that roam the dense forest edges where they are overgrown by bramble and hazelnut bushes that provide shelter and food. They raise their young in a nest carefully woven from dry grass. The work was published in the “Italian Journal of Mammalogy”.
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