Question: What does this animal look like in detail?

Sive Finlay answered on 12 Nov 2013:

Hi Sean,
So I guess you mean what do tenrecs look like?
Tenrecs are a family of mammals; there are 34 different species all of which are relatively small. The really cool thing about tenrecs is that many of them look like animals to which they aren’t closely related.
For example, there are two species called the greater and lesser hedgehog tenrecs (you’ll find lots of pictures and cute videos of these) which, unsurprisingly, look very similar to hedgehogs. Then there’s a whole group of tenrecs in a genus called Microgale which look like shrews. There are other tenrecs in a genus called Oryzorictes which look like moles. And there are even some tenrecs which are semi-aquatic and look like otters! Look up a picture of the Giant Otter Shrew; it’s not an otter or a shrew, it’s a tenrec! Then there are just downright weird tenrecs like the lowland and highland streaked tenrecs which have black and yellow stripes, are spiny and they’re the only mammals which can produce sound by rubbing their spines together- a bit like crickets or grasshoppers!
What makes all of these species more interesting is that tenrecs aren’t closely related to hedgehogs, shrews, moles or otters. In fact, they are more closely related to elephants and aardvarks!
When animals evolve to look like species to which they aren’t closely related it’s called convergent evolution. There are lots of famous examples; like marsupials that look similar to placental mammals or dolphins that look like ichthyosaurs even though one is a mammal and the other is a reptile. The similarities among tenrecs and other mammals is another example of convergent evolution but it’s not as well studied as the better-known examples.
In my PhD research I want to measure exactly how physically similar tenrecs are to other species and then I will test the idea whether species that look alike also live in similar environmental niches.
Hope that gives you a bit more information about tenrecs. If you need any more convincing for how awesome tenrecs are, here’s an impossibly cute video of baby hedgehog tenrecs having a bath 🙂 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNaSrGk9A0E

Sive