Botta's Pocket Gopher
Thomomys bottae
Background description 3
Botta's pocket gopher (Thomomys bottae) is a pocket gopher native to western North America. It is also known in some sources as valley pocket gopher, particularly in California. Both the specific and common names of this species honor Paul-Émile Botta, a naturalist and archaeologist who collected mammals in California in the 1820s and 1830s.
Summary 4
Valley pocket gophers have a body length of 11.5 to 30 cm, and a tail length of 4 to 9.5 cm. Males are considerably larger than females. One study showed that average male weight was 141 g, while females weighed 90 g ( Daly 1986). The fur is short, smooth, and soft. The underside fur is only somewhat paler than the dorsal. Many of the 185 subspecies aredistinguished by color, which varies from grey, to brown, to tan to almost black. Thomomys bottae has a robust body and has short legs with long front claws. It has small eyes and ears and a tail that is naked at the tip (Grzimek 1990). Pocket gophers are characterized by deep fur-lined cheek pouches, and the genus Thomomys is characterized by upper incisors that lack frontal grooves (Grzimek 1990).
http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Thomomys_bottae/
Sources and Credits
- (c) Ken-ichi Ueda, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC-SA), http://www.flickr.com/photos/18024068@N00/145893528
- (c) stephaniefausett, all rights reserved
- Adapted by stephaniefausett from a work by (c) Wikipedia, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomomys_bottae
- (c) stephaniefausett, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA)
