Procyonidae

• 1. Introduction

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  Procyonidae is a family of New World mammals that German speakers nicknamed Kleinbären, meaning small bears. A raccoon becomes a Waschbär, a washing bear, because it appears to wash its food before eating. A coati becomes a Nasenbär, a nose-bear. A kinkajou becomes a Honigbär, a honey-bear. Dutch speakers borrowed the same logic, calling them wasbeer, neusbeer, and rolstaartbeer, the curl-tail bear. The names feel obvious, since these animals do resemble bears in miniature. Yet the resemblance is a trap. Modern study suggests procyonids are more closely related to mustelids than to bears at all. So what exactly are these creatures, where did they come from, and why did scientists keep getting their family tree wrong? This documentary follows the raccoons, ringtails, cacomistles, coatis, kinkajous, olingos, and olinguitos through their bodies, their behavior, their deep past, and the long argument over how they should be sorted.

• 2. Bodies Built For Omnivory

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  Procyonids are relatively small animals, usually with slender bodies and long tails, although the common raccoon tends toward a bulkier build. They share a set of skull features that mark the family: a shortened rostrum, absent alisphenoid canals, and a relatively flat mandibular fossa. These are quiet anatomical signatures, the kind a specialist reads to place a skull in this group.

  The omnivorous diet of procyonids has cost them some of the meat-eating equipment their carnivore relatives keep. They still have carnassial teeth, the shearing blades of true carnivores, but in most species these are poorly developed, especially in the raccoons. The dental arithmetic is precise. Apart from the kinkajou, procyonids carry a total of 40 teeth, while the kinkajou has one fewer premolar in each row, for 36 teeth in all.

  The kinkajou stands apart in more than its teeth. It carries unique morphological traits tied to a life spent in trees, including a prehensile tail and an unusual femoral structure. That prehensile tail is the curl-tail the Dutch name pointed at, an anchor for an animal that climbs and hangs while it forages.

• 3. Solitary Lives, Strange Bands

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  Most members of Procyonidae live alone, but the family bends that rule in revealing ways. Coati females gather into bands of 4 to 24 individuals that forage together, a striking degree of cooperation in a family of loners. Kinkajous arrange themselves differently, having been found in social groups of two males and one female.

  Reproduction splits the family along the same line. Ringtails, olingos, and kinkajous tend to give birth to a single offspring. Raccoons and coatis instead produce litters ranging from 2 to 6 young. The contrast between a lone pup and a crowded den hints at very different strategies hidden inside one family.

• 4. An Offshoot In The Miocene

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  Procyonid fossils once attributed to the genus Bassariscus, the group that holds the modern ringtail and cacomistle, reach back to the Miocene epoch, around 20 million years ago. One idea holds that early procyonids branched off from the canids and then adapted to a more omnivorous diet, trading a hunter's specialization for a generalist's range.

  Central America sits at the heart of the family's recent evolution, and it remains the place where procyonid diversity is greatest. From there they pushed into South America, which had long stood isolated as its own continent. That entry came as part of the Great American Interchange, beginning about 7.3 million years ago in the late Miocene, marked by the appearance of Cyonasua.

  The family was not always confined to the Americas. Some fossil procyonids, such as Stromeriella, once lived in the Old World before dying out in the Pliocene, a reminder that the group's range was once wider than the New World label suggests.

• 5. Reading The Genetic Clock

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  Genetic studies place the kinkajous as a sister group to all other living procyonids, a lineage that split off about 22.6 million years ago. That makes the honey-bear of the trees the oldest surviving branch of the family.

  The remaining procyonids divided into two great limbs about 17.7 million years ago. One limb leads to the coatis and olingos; the other leads to the ringtails and raccoons. The branches kept splitting on a near-shared schedule. Olingos and coatis diverged about 10.2 million years ago, at roughly the same moment that ringtails and raccoons parted ways. The split between coatis and mountain coatis is estimated at 7.7 million years ago, a final fork in a long sequence of separations.

• 6. The Long Argument Over Names

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  Considerable historical uncertainty has surrounded the correct classification of several members of this family. The red panda was once placed here, but molecular biology studies moved it into its own family, the Ailuridae. The olingos caused their own confusion, with some researchers treating them all as subspecies of Bassaricyon gabbii until DNA sequence data proved otherwise.

  The traditional classification scheme predates the recent shift in understanding driven by genetic sequence analysis. That older scheme grouped kinkajous and olingos together, misled by shared morphology that is now recognized as parallel evolution. It also drew coatis as closest to raccoons, when in fact they sit nearest the olingos. The genus Nasuella escaped the main molecular studies, but a separate study found it nesting within Nasua.

  The living family now divides into two subfamilies. Procyoninae holds nine species in four genera, the raccoons of Procyon, the coatis of Nasua and Nasuella, and the ringtail and cacomistle of Bassariscus. Potosinae holds five species in two genera, the kinkajou of Potos and the four olingos and the olinguito of Bassaricyon, including Bassaricyon neblina, the olinguito.

• 7. Vanished Branches

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  Beneath the living species lies a thick layer of extinct procyonids, many known only as fossil genera. The family was named by J.E. Gray in 1825, and the dagger symbol that marks extinction trails through its catalogue. The extinct subfamily Broilianinae, named by Dehm in 1950, holds genera such as Broiliana and Stromeriella.

  South America preserves some of the most dramatic fossils. Cyonasua, named by Ameghino in 1885, swept up several later names as synonyms, including Amphinasua, Brachynasua, and Pachynasua. Chapalmalania, named by Ameghino in 1908, stands beside it among the extinct Procyoninae. The roster runs on through Arctonasua, Edaphocyon, Paranasua, Probassariscus, and fossil species of the still-living genera Bassariscus, Nasua, and Procyon. Among the stranger entries is Tetraprothomo argentinus, another of Ameghino's 1908 names, a fossil whose place in this family closes the long list of branches that the small bears left behind in the rock.