Talk:Pacific degu

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No images of Pacific degus available

There are only images available from dead animals collected for the German Alexander Koenig Museum in Bonn and one can find some black-white photos in the article of Rainer Hutterer (1994) or asking in the museum if one can see the preserved specimen (as a friend of mine did). The collected specimens were snap trapped in 1959 and shipped to Germany but they were forgotten in the basement of the museum until the 1990s and the German mammalogist Rainer Hutterer took the opportunity to describe this new species (btw. the whole story is explained in the work of Hutterer 1994). Later some Chilean scientists (Saavedra et al. 2003) made some efforts to find evidence for living individuals and trapped nearly the whole island but didn't succeed, thus it is suggested that this species is extinct now. Because the animals are trapped more than 60 years before they were described as a new species and since then nobody has ever seen a living individual, it is hard to state any precise detail about how they lived and thus it is highly questionable to state that this species is diurnal. Maybe there is some indication to assume that they are diurnal, but I think this should be stressed, that this is an assumption and not a fact.--DegupediaDE (talk) 13:45, 27 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

References

Hutterer, R. 1994. Island rodents: a new species of Octodon from Isla Mocha, Chile (Mammalia: Octodontidae). Zeitschrift für Säugetierkunde 59: 27-41.
Saavedra, B. Quitoz, D. Iriarte, J. 2003. Past and present small mammals of Isla Mocha (Chile). Mammalian Biology 68: 365-371.