A new mammal recorded in Karura Forest.
Confirmed by corresponding experts to be an African Palm Civet (Nandinia binotata arborea, a.k.a. the two-spotted civet). Captured along the banks of the Ruaka River (S -1.236249°, E 36.839071°), the civet is at the extreme eastern edge of its range in Africa.  Compare the size to a Large Spotted Genet regularly seen at the same location.

Dead Suni

Freshly-killed ad. female suni on Mau-Mau Trail between Junction 12a and 28 21 February 2016 ca 09:15.

Any views on likely predator? Gut contents neatly put to one side suggest a raptor, and the location is certainly within range of both the Karura River and the Gitathuru pairs of African crowned eagles, not to mention the others in the neighborhood (Ayres' long-crested, etc.). On the other hand, signs of damage to the throat.

Sykes' male with tail wound

This male was heard (at first) being pursued by another through a Karura-side Muthaiga garden along the Gitathuru River. He was vocalising continuously and seemed to be in quite a bit of distress. No wonder. Could the other male have inflicted something so serious to his tail? Or might he have survived a crowned eagle attack? Male Sykes have been recently seen holding off a hunting crowned with rushes, battings, and branch-shaking. Perhaps the eagle had enough. Any views?

Help with mongoose ID

Caught the fellow shown on a camera trap along the Ruaka
River (KK17) in Karura Forest (only place where we've caught copyus BTW).

We only have slenders  on our list, but this fellow looks a bit larger and heavier like an Egyptian. Have added a bushbuck standing in the same spot for scale. Comments appreciated.

Mystery Mammal Along Ruaka River

UPDATE. Uh-oh. Spoke too soon. Evidence of copyu breeding? This appears to be a half-grown youngster following an adult.

This odd little fellow was caught running along the edge of the Ruaka River. Note time and date stamp. First reaction was an otter, but compared to other shots we've had of the African Clawless otter (Aonyx capensis), this one seems to be smaller, the conspicuous tail is missing (seems to have a rather stubby dark tail on in first two images), the nose is blunter and the ears higher up on the head. Neither is it very hyrax-like in shape of head; plus there is evidence in the middle clip of a tail. The consensus is coypu (nutria, river rat, Myocastor coypu).  We have learned that there is a residential plot upstream of Karura that has coypu's in a fishpond. It is not too far from two of the forest's watercourses, one of which is the Ruaka, so an escapee is not impossible. No further sightings on this cameral up till now (end Feb 2016).

Definitely Otters

Dead Suni found. Cause of death?

A visitor to Karura (Sigiria side) found a dead Suni and posted this:

30/10/15 found this, dead, by the road near the Thigiri Gate. It was just past the fitness area, where the bush has recently been cleared out from under the trees, on LHS. Couldn't get a better shot, or investigate further, owing to having my dog with me (he was keen to investigate himself!). Hardly eaten tho.

Any views as to likely cause of death? There have been one or two feral dogs sighted in the area, and we know there are one or two dog owners who are less than cooperative with the dogs-on-leash rule. We also have African crowned eagles, although not that I know of have been sighted on the Sigiria side of the forest. But an eagle (or a ratel) would have eaten more, no? Or, in the case of the eagle, carried to carcass off to feed its young.

Primate Origins & Classification

Hi, Card-carrying Mammalogists. Is this reference as about as good as it gets for primate genealogy & systematics?

Abstract Phylogenetic relationships, divergence times, and patterns of biogeographic descent among primate species are both complex and contentious. Here, we generate a robust molecular phylogeny for 70 primate genera and 367 primate species based on a concatenation of 69 nuclear gene segments and ten mitochondrial gene sequences, most of which were extracted from GenBank. Relaxed clock analyses of divergence times with 14 fossil-calibrated nodes suggest that living Primates last shared a common ancestor 71–63 Ma, and that divergences within both Strepsirrhini and Haplorhini are entirely post-Cretaceous. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs played an important role in the diversification of placental mammals. Previous queries into primate historical biogeography have suggested Africa, Asia, Europe, or North America as the ancestral area of crown primates, but were based on methods that were coopted from phylogeny reconstruction. By contrast, we analyzed our molecular phylogeny with two methods that were developed explicitly for ancestral area reconstruction, and find support for the hypothesis that the most recent common ancestor of living Primates resided in Asia. Analyses of primate macroevolutionary dynamics provide support for a diversification rate increase in the late Miocene, possibly in response to elevated global mean temperatures, and are consistent with the fossil record. By contrast, diversification analyses failed to detect evidence for rate-shift changes near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary even though the fossil record provides clear evidence for a major turnover event (‘‘Grande Coupure’’) at this time. Our results highlight the power and limitations of inferring diversification dynamics from molecular phylogenies, as well as the sensitivity of diversification analyses to different species concepts.

Citation: Springer MS, Meredith RW, Gatesy J, Emerling CA, Park J, et al. (2012) Macroevolutionary Dynamics and Historical Biogeography of Primate Diversification Inferred from a Species Supermatrix. PLoS ONE 7(11): e49521. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049521 Editor: Roscoe Stanyon, University of Florence, Italy Received May 17, 2012; Accepted October 9, 2012; Published November 16, 2012 Copyright: ß 2012 Springer et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by NSF (EF0629860 to MSS and JG; EF0629849 to WJM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: mark.springer@ucr.edu (MS); wmurphy@cvm.tamu.edu (WJM)