Big-eared fox: It's not a fox! People have been mistaken for 200 years. What kind of strange animal is this? (10 photos)

The big-eared fox makes funny faces at scientists. After all, she asked them a riddle that took 200 years to solve! Biologists almost immediately realized that the rogue has nothing to do with real foxes. But it was easy to remove her from the fox family, but difficult to find new relatives. There were too many oddities in this little animal.





Would you like to give Dobby a sock?

The most noticeable oddity is... no, not the ears. The ears of foxes are quite typical. Yes, they are large, up to 15 centimeters long. But the fennec's ears are almost the same size, and even larger relative to the head. At the same time, the fennec is a real fox.

Both lop-eared foxes have acquired giant locators for cooling. They work like a radiator - they remove heat from the body. Very useful if you don't want your insides to turn into hot meat in the scorching sun.

And the big-eared fox lives in the eternally sunny African savannahs.



As if it was assembled from parts of a hare, a deer and a fox cub.

The most noticeable oddity of big-eared foxes is their teeth. They are small and very sharp, and in their mouths there are 48 of them. That's more than any other land mammal!

Such a palisade of sharp little pegs is ideal for chewing on small but well-protected prey. For example, crickets, beetles, ants and termites.





Put food here...

And to prevent them from biting back, big-eared foxes have learned to chew at a speed of 10 movements per second. A person only manages to bite in that time - our average chewing speed is 14 movements of the jaws in 20 seconds.

Not a single insect manages to offer even symbolic resistance to a big-eared fox.



Thanks to its insect diet, the fox almost never needs drinking water. The exception is the nursing period. In order to produce milk, the mother fox goes to a flowing body of water.

In fact, the diet of big-eared foxes is the second distinctive feature. They are the only insectivores of the entire order of predators. Their diet consists of arthropods by about 90%, and this is with a weight of 5 kilos.



The size of a domestic cat, but on long legs.

The animals eat almost all of their weight on two species: harvester termites and dung beetles - they make up 60-90% of their entire diet. The animal finds the former by ear. A fox can detect an underground termite den many meters away in all directions. If it listens carefully.

The giant ears catch the slightest rustle even underground. So the fox digs up underground insect strongholds or eats them right at the entrance to the termite mound.



A fox eats several thousand termites a day. Imagine how many lives this small family will take!

But the fox finds dung beetles with the help of its sense of smell. True, it tries to smell not the insects themselves, but large ungulates. The predator follows zebras, antelopes and buffalos to collect adult bugs and larvae from their patties.



You can tell from his eyes that this guy has seen a lot...

To make it less offensive, foxes do their sewer work in a friendly company! And this is the third distinctive feature of the big-eared foxes - they are surprisingly friendly to each other! Around a large termite mound or "mine" field of beef, 15 to 20 individuals gather at a time. This is because the animals live in pairs or small family groups. They are territorial, but neighboring possessions always partially overlap. The pack spends almost all the time together.



Fox tower.

For the most part, big-eared foxes are monogamous animals. But if a male is able to pull two or three females at once, he will not hesitate to get himself several wives at once.

And after the birth of children, he will take on almost all the care for them.



I don't want cockroaches. And my son too.

And this is the fourth oddity in the piggy bank of the African pseudo fox. Only 6% of mammal species have males who care for their children equally with females. And very few fathers take on most of the household chores. This behavior is not typical not only for predators, but for mammals as a class!



The male differs from the children in size, but he has exactly the same expression of bewilderment on his face.

It was these oddities that led to difficulties in determining family ties. And it was only possible to figure it out when we got into the genome! Big-eared foxes were first described in 1822, but it wasn't until 2005 that scientists discovered that they belong to a separate genus.

And their closest relatives are raccoon dogs, which live on the other side of the world - in Asia!