There is an animal on the American plains that is not a dog. There is one in the desert that is not a rabbit. There is one on the mountains that is not a goat. There is one that everybody calls an antelope, and its closest living relative is the giraffe. And the most famous animal in the United States, the one on the nickel and in the song, is not what its name says either.

This is not pedantry. In every one of these five cases the animal belongs to a completely different branch of the mammal family tree from the one its name points at. The prairie dog is a ground squirrel. The jackrabbit is a hare, and the difference between a hare and a rabbit decides how the animal is born, where it lives and whether it digs at all. The mountain goat is not in the goat genus and its closest relatives are the chamois of the Alps and the takin of the Himalaya. The pronghorn is the only living member of its family, and molecular work places it beside the giraffe and the okapi rather than anywhere near an antelope. And the American buffalo is a bison, while the two real buffalo live in Africa and Asia.

Every one of these names came from the same moment repeated five times. Somebody arrived on a continent they had never seen, met an animal that did not exist in their language, and reached for the closest word they already had. Those words are now on coins, road signs, songs and the names of cities and teams, and none of them are going anywhere.

You can watch the full documentary about any of these animals here: America's Prehistoric Animals Documentaries

CHAPTERS
00:00  Five Names, Five Mistakes
01:05  It Is a Squirrel
06:22  Hares Are Born With Their Eyes Open
10:51  Airlifted Out by Helicopter
15:43  Its Closest Relative Is the Giraffe
20:37  The Song Got It Wrong
25:52  The Best Guess Available

SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Prairie dogs are ground squirrels (Sciuridae, genus Cynomys); the name derives from French petit chien, and Lewis and Clark called them barking squirrels, shipping a live one to Jefferson in 1805
Alarm call research reports encoding of predator type, size and clothing colour; the interpretation is contested. The jump-yip is a contagious upright display, not an alarm call
A Texas colony in the 1890s was estimated at circa 400 million animals, a period estimate rather than a census; prairie dogs now occupy circa 2 percent of former range and plague, introduced circa 1900, can collapse a colony in weeks
Jackrabbits are hares (Lepus): born furred with eyes open in a surface form, and they do not dig; rabbits are born naked and blind in a burrow
Black-tailed jackrabbits reach circa 40 mph, use the ears for thermoregulation, and take the name from jackass rabbit. The antelope jackrabbit is neither an antelope nor a rabbit
All domestic rabbits descend from the European rabbit; native North American lagomorphs are cottontails and hares
Oreamnos americanus is not in the genus Capra; it is a goat-antelope closest to the chamois, serows and takin. Hooves have a hard outer rim and a soft inner pad
Both sexes carry similar horns used for stabbing rather than butting; alpine vegetation is low in sodium and movement is organised around mineral licks
Mountain goats were introduced to the Olympic Peninsula in the twentieth century, sought salt from humans on trails, and a hiker was killed by a habituated male in 2010
Between 2018 and 2020 several hundred were sedated and airlifted by helicopter out of Olympic National Park to the North Cascades within their native range
The pronghorn is the only living member of Antilocapridae; molecular evidence places its closest relatives as the giraffe and okapi. There are no native antelope in North America
Pronghorn horns combine a permanent bony core with a branched keratin sheath shed annually, unique among living animals; sustained circa 60 mph is read as a response to the extinct American cheetah
Pronghorn have the largest eyes relative to body size of any North American ungulate, near 320 degrees of view; they pass under fences rather than jumping and bottom-wire modification is standard mitigation
Pronghorn fell from perhaps 35 million to circa 13,000 by the 1920s and recovered to roughly 500,000
True buffalo are the Cape buffalo and the water buffalo; the American bison's closest relative is the European wisent. Bison have a hump, beard and short upward horns; bison and cattle interbreed, buffalo and cattle do not
The name buffalo is attributed to French boeuf or to buff leather; naturalists standardised on bison by the late 1800s but the word was already fixed in place names. The Buffalo, New York, beau fleuve derivation is disputed
The bison on the 1913 five cent piece was modelled from a live animal in a New York menagerie, commonly identified as Black Diamond, though disputed

#Wildlife #Bison #Pronghorn #NaturalHistory #AmericanWest